The UFO Encyclopedia : The Phenomenon from the Beginning (2 Volume Set) by Jerome Clark

Many have wished for the existence of a fundamental reader on the immense topic of UFOlogy that cuts through the self-promotions of the cottage industry, sees hoaxes and likely errors of perception for what they are, respects the scientific method as the best way to approach irreducible and anomalous data, understands the impact of organized disinformation and inevitable misinformation on a proto-science denied the multidisciplinary efforts that would bring its data into clearer focus, yet keeps in front of us the best quality of information and presents it with appreciation for the critiques of both debunkers and agnostics applying Occam’s razor to interpretations.

Jerry Clark’s 2-volume UFO Encyclopedia does this in a comprehensive, thorough, extraordinary way. His work and mind are – duh!–encyclopedic in all the best senses of the term. No exploration of this subject would be complete without reference to this material.

A Tale of Two Sciences: Memoirs of a Dissident Scientist

by Peter A. Sturrock

(Exoscience: Palo Alto) 2009.

by Richard Thieme

“A Tale of Two Sciences:  Memoirs of a Dissident Scientist,” by Dr. Peter A. Sturrock, is a personal work by the well-known Stanford physicist and astrophysicist, reflecting on the sometimes complementary, sometimes discordant threads of his professional lives: one as a conventional scientist, with a long list of respected publications, and one as an unconventional scientist who explored anomalous phenomena, in particular UFO phenomena.

His conventional scientific career might be a surprise to those who know him only in relationship to UFO studies; it is recounted here in terms that any educated layman can understand – in fact, the simplicity and clarity of his explanations of, say, plasma physics or pulsars, are a testimony to his deep knowledge – one can’t explain complex phenomena so clearly otherwise. And for readers who want to go a little deeper, there is a small bit of helpful math in appendices.

His unconventional career, on the other hand, has resulted in the full spectrum of responses which unfortunately are familiar to all researchers in anomalies –embarrassed smiles, curt dismissals, ridicule, the bemused shaking of a lot of heads – all of which tell the researcher that he or she is at best tolerated as an eccentric and at worst dismissed as a nut case.

The two strands of his unconventional career consist of accumulated evidence, the content of his explorations, food for further thought and research, and his personal account of reactions to that work and in turn his reactions to those reactions over a lifetime.

This is a memoir, not a scientific treatise, so it must be evaluated for what it tells us about the man and his internal journey as well as the rewards of a long career in orthodox scientific research. It is well-written, careful in its pronouncements, understated, eminently sane, and occasionally mind-boggling, especially for the uninitiated who previously accepted the dismissal of anomalies like UFOs and ESP uncritically. The book is a significant contribution to the psychology of science and scientists as well and can serve as the wise words of a mentor for younger scientists tempted by the forbidden. Sturrock warns those who would follow in his footsteps to count the cost. Enduring decades of abrasive dismissals by scientists who at their personal worst are unscientific makes this path a long-distance run, not a sprint, that requires stamina, grit, and renewable commitment.

A lifetime of cognitive dissonance is one result of the subject matter Sturrock investigates and frequent rejection of the pursuit itself, much less the fruits of that pursuit. At the core his commitment is the essence of a properly scientific attitude, namely, curiosity, curiosity about the ineluctably real that imprints itself indelibly on one’s consciousness.  Reading this narrative, one thinks of Francis Bacon’s response when criticized by the Church for dissecting cadavers to learn about human anatomy because the Church was afraid that his discoveries might contradict its teachings: “Whatever deserves to exist deserves to be known.”

So ultimately there has been for Peter Sturrock not two careers but one and one mode of knowing and wanting to know, the scientific mode applied rigorously and without prejudice. Conventional and unconventional science alike are the front and back of a single discipline requiring that one attends to the data, formulate hypotheses, then test and revise them, leaving the next generation with a slightly better understanding of what seems to exists in a complex universe.

Sturrock is well known in UFO circles as the organizer of the Pocantico Conference in September 1997 which brought together an eclectic group of scientists at the Pocantico Conference Center near Tarrytown, New York to hear presentations on selected cases and some summaries of UFO effects by serious researchers. Financed by Laurence Rockefeller, the conference straddled the forbidden and the familiar and included researchers known to readers of this journal such as Jacques Vallee, Mark Rodigher, and Richard Haines. The medium, a respectable scientific conference, was intended to be the message as well, leading to greater credibility for research into UFO phenomena. The conference concluded with carefully phrased, conservative, thoughtful suggestions that challenged orthodox scientists by proposing additional topics and structures for research.

Sturrock wrote about the conference in detail in “The UFO Enigma: a New Review of the Physical Evidence,” published in 1999 by Warner Books.  Much of that material is reviewed in this memoir, but because this is a memoir, there is a critical difference: “It is not easy to have a split personality,” Sturrock writes in the first sentence of the preface; “this book is – in part – an attempt to remedy that situation.” That compelling drive to clarify the data, integrate it into a unified framework, and articulate tentative but provocative conclusions about what it tells us to explore next – this is a subtext of this work. That drive, Sturrock makes clear, is motivated in part by the desire to alleviate the cognitive dissonance of which I spoke; that internal conflict must be addressed by a mature healthy ego, one’s life work must be justified and justifiable, to others as well as oneself. That too is a subtext of this work. Sturrock the man as well as the wary scientist shows up and makes his case. By establishing basic criteria – does it exist? therefore is it deserving of being understood? – for work in all arenas, Sturrock challenges again and again the irrational or non-rational rejection of the subject matter in itself by those who claim the scientific method as their modus opperandi. He places the burden on scientists who refuse even to look much less pay attention. And that challenge, I am afraid, will be handled by most career scientists as they have handled both Sturrock and the subject matter in the past, by not acknowledging that it exists.

Because Sturrock is willing in this personal account to reveal more of the feeling behind his thinking, he is impelled to conclusions that have not been often articulated in the past. UFO researchers since Hynek have noted the “strangeness” of some reports, aspects of the experience that might sound like science fiction to those unfamiliar with the now-voluminous body of research. At the end of the work, he advances an alternative view of physics that might account for the “strangeness” of some UFO reports, that vehicles or entities seem to be here yet not here at the same time, that observers walk around a luminous object which disappears as if tucked into a nook of spacetime behind a hidden curtain, that experiences of telepathic communication or transfer of knowledge have taken place… and that the compelling testimony of people for sixty years (and likely more) from all over the world, their experiences in agreement in many small details … this mass of experience and data should not be ignored.

His conclusions suggest in essence that current models of reality derived from physics do not account for what has been observed; therefore oblique trajectories must be drawn and followed to explore possibilities to begin to account for them – and perhaps reap practical rewards for spacetime travel, energy consumption, and medicine.

And because the narrative is from one point of view an apologia, a justification of a lifetime of unorthodox pursuits, and because sanity, like wisdom, is contextual, the author marshals a sequence of historical antecedents of theories that were rejected out of hand when first proposed but that turned out to be of merit. Consensus realities in the past led to the same kind of ridicule and “debunking” that UFO researchers experience today; heterodox ideas gained a foothold among mainstream scientists “one funeral at a time,” as Max Planck described progress in science.  Sturrock refers to the famous instance of meteorites which could not possibly exist because “rocks do not fall from the sky,” and battered child syndrome, the details of which could not be heard when first presented to doctors, and the theory of plate tectonics, and in his primary domain of expertise, theories about neutrinos and pulsars.  One thinks too of Raymond Dart and his work on Australopithecus, widely rejected for many years.

Such stories are widely known, and some of the motive power for repeating them comes I suspect from the need to establish a “tradition” of advances in science that occurred after prophets who first articulated them had been scorned and dishonored.  So on one level, the text reminds both scientists and laity that good science ought to consider anomalies worthy of investigation, and on a personal or psychological level, the author must make the case that in all of the work he has done, he listens carefully, observes scrupulously, and rigorously investigates before formulating a hypothesis.

Part of making his case is the entire first part of the memoir which reviews Sturrock’s educational and vocational history, linked by memories of influential teachers, mentors, and colleagues. That organizing principle is an attribute of memoirs too, the narrative sequence determined by memories of people important to the author’s personal and professional life.  Those chapters establish that Sturrock was indeed mentored and respected by conventional scientists of some renown, that some of the best people in his field led him into research in Europe and the United States in astrophysics and physics that resulted in numerous papers and a long distinguished career at Stanford University, one of the most respected academic environments in the world.

Then, having hung that framework like a curtain, Sturrock discusses his “other” career as a dissident scientist. A man, in other words, who was curious and found the universe, as Alice said, even “curiouser and curiouser.”

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? That the scientific mind is curious?  Yet again and again, Sturrock was frustrated by the absence of this core attribute, arguably the cornerstone of intelligence, the willingness to poke one’s whiskers out beyond the door of one’s snug abode and sniff the air;  that frustration comes to the surface in anecdote after anecdote.  So many colleagues were tamed and constrained by a culture of caution and hesitancy, a fear of being branded a heretic, a terror, after all, of losing one’s benefits.

In addition to UFO phenomena, Sturrock discusses possible instances of the paranormal, spontaneous healing, and reincarnation.  But UFO phenomena is in the foreground of his research. In the past he has discussed case histories, summaries of physical and psychological effects, and phenomena which seems to violate known laws of physics. He has always been appropriately cautious in public pronouncements, mindful of mine fields, tiptoeing with care.  He has generally avoided mention of personal reactions to his work, such as the near-terror of SETI researchers, for example, who thought he was attending a conference on extraterrestrial life and might advance the UFO point of view to their embarrassment. (My experience interviewing Frank Drake and Jill Tarter echoed Sturrock’s. The economic and political requirements of SETI, fighting for several hundred million dollars in endowment funds against a strong political headwind, necessitated, Tarter told me, a strict divorce of their project from “bad science,” defined as anything that might taint their efforts. She used her own mistaken identification of the moon as a UFO during an airplane ride as an example of why all UFO reports must be something similar. When I observed that this was not scientific, she did not respond. I recall feeling – as Sturrock often did – taken aback by the lack of a scientific attitude on the part of a well-known scientist.)

In all of his multiple pursuits, it is possible – not certain – that Sturrock’s English upbringing influenced some of his attitudes and interests. Based on my experiences while living in England as a young man, I offer these speculations.

First, I learned in England that loud expressions of enthusiasm are often frowned on. I recall that when Sesame Street was introduced to English television audiences, for example, a friend said a much better program was the one in which children sat quietly on the floor while a teacher read a story. When an Englishman felt strongly about something, he was more inclined  to say “um” quietly instead of “oh boy gee whiz wow!”

This is relevant because this is a review of a memoir, not a scientific paper. It underscores the habitual understatement which for an Englishman born and bred reveals rather than contradicts intensity of feeling. If an exuberant American extrovert like myself were to write this account, it might say: Please, people! this is DATA! this is observable, frequently reported data! and it challenges the way we believe the universe works! Let’s THINK about it, shall we?

But Sturrock is English, and always, his conclusions and proposals are those of a careful scientist. He insists on using Bayes’ Theorem as a touchstone for a sane way to proceed in every investigation, he never goes beyond the data itself, and he restricts the presentation of data to documented events.

Here’s a second hunch about “things English:” in addition to advances that created modern scientific thinking beginning with the Royal Society, there has been regard in England for the eccentric, the anomalous, the struggle to reconcile the known and the unknown into one big picture. The work of the Society for Psychical Research at the turn of the twentieth century included psychologists like Frederick W. H. Myers, philosophers like William James, politicians like Lord Balfour, physicists like Oliver Lodge, and serious, thoughtful investigation of mediums, spirits, spontaneous manifestations of apparitions at a time of crisis, the survival of bodily death, and the like. My hunch is simply that Sturrock is part of that tradition too. He knew that wise distinguished men did not reject a subject a priori but peered into the shadows on the edges of experience. He knew that Conan Doyle and Williams Butler Yates evangelized for the existence of faeries. That framework is part of the heritage of a man who suggests that when we turn around and look at the world, we transit a full 360 degrees before coming home again, knowing that when we do, the self at which we arrive will not be the self which departed on that journey.

A few years ago, I reviewed Jonathan Moreno’s “Mind Wars,” an investigation by a neuroscientist and bioethicist with good credentials. Moreno investigated research based on biology and neuroscience for warfare and “perception management.” Like Sturrock, Moreno advanced conventional credentials again and again, recounting his work with intelligence agencies, for example, so he could insist to a skeptical audience that he was not “a conspiracy theorist” or a nut-case but a legitimate credentialed academic.

Moreno worked with intelligence professionals and wrote openly about national security and secrecy issues. He told me scientists often “clammed up” when he asked about their research, that they dared not say a word for the record. Sturrock does not dwell on that aspect of research into anomalous phenomena but it is there nevertheless. Not only do sociological and cultural molds for conformity mold the clay of scientific research, but precisely because the data is compelling, precisely because it would have attracted attention, and research, and dollars in the past, whatever might have been discussed behind closed doors is beyond our reach. Life in the national security state since World War 2 adds even greater cognitive dissonance to our quest for understanding. It is not only the universe that plays dice with us but, closer to home, it is likely that some in positions of authority do too. No wonder we feel so often we are looking into a fun-house mirror when we try to connect the dots. The elusiveness of anomalies is further distorted by the fact that we don’t and can’t know what we don’t know … about who does know more about them.

It is a characteristic of an anomaly that it does not connect with other known facts. It hangs in the air like the grin of a Cheshire cat, tantalizing but out of reach. That characteristic also afflicts the fruits of research into anomalies. The Pocantico Conference, for example, resulted in distinguished scientists contradicting the Condon Report, the last known “official” Government paper on UFOs,  and made recommendations, and then … nothing. The investigation of anomalies became, itself, anomalous. Sturrock also cites GEPAN/SEPRA as one model for investigation of UFO events, so one might expect the work done by the French to be on our radar, but … it remains anomalous, too. A society which Sturrock helped to found – The Society for Scientific Exploration –an attempt to bridge the two worlds – and its publication, The Journal of Scientific Exploration, have also resulted in important work but … the society, the journal, remain in limbo, a bit off the beaten path, interesting to some, but anomalous. For the moment, those efforts are here and not here at the same time, lacking integration into mainstream thought. They accumulate but remain liminal to the primary concerns of establishment scientists, mainstream media, and 21^st century consensus reality.

The promise of this thoughtful, so-interesting memoir is that one more drip in a sequence of drips on the rocks of reality will help to wear away the resistant rock. The fear is that this work too will be dismissed as a quirky look into weird, new-agey experiences, an off-road trip irrelevant to the highways of career science.

The counter-cultural view? If it exists, it is worthy of being understood.

And so is Peter Sturrock.

Originally published in IUR: The International UFO Reporter (Volume 33, Number 1) March 2010, the official publication of CUFOS

A Review of “This Way to the Stars: How Quantum Physics Changes Current Space Propulsion Paradigms, Making Inter-Galactic Travel a Possibility” (Timeless Voyager Press: 2008) 96 pages by Paul Kirsch.

by

Richard Thieme

www.themeworks.com

From Paul Hill’s posthumously published “Unconventional Flying Objects” to Nick Cook’s “Hunt for Zero Point,” a number of people have attempted to formulate a valid scientific model for understanding what is often reported by eyewitnesses to UFO events – anomalous vehicles with capabilities that suggest that our current understanding of physics is primitive.

Of course, “current understanding” is a moving target. Some of what was reported early on – like stealth technology – has now been developed, and when the Wall Street Journal reports on invisibility cloaking as they did on March 13, 2009, it seems that some attributes formerly thought “too strange to be real” are not so strange after all.

But that does not mean that everything that sounds strange or impossible is simply waiting for the right engineer. Some things really aren’t possible. Some things really can’t happen.

So while we should not at the outset cavalierly dismiss Paul Kirsch’s claim to reveal “How Quantum Physics Changes Current Space Propulsion Paradigms, Making Inter-Galactic Travel a Possibility,” as “This Way to the Stars” is subtitled, neither should we simply accept it as presented. Science requires more than earnestness, it also requires good science. We must not only trust, but verify. Fanciful narratives like Bob Lazar’s fable of reverse-engineering alien craft litter the messy floors of historical UFOlogy.

When we apply science to Kirsch’s lovingly illustrated picture book, a shift from physics to science fiction takes place.

Kirsch is not a physicist. He works in medical administration, has a longtime interest in UFOs, and became fascinated with the ideas of Larry D. Maurer and Michael E. Miller, principals at UNITEL, a Portland OR company formed in 1982 to research and develop practical applications of new theories in magnetism, electricity and quantum mechanical physics. According to information posted on the company’s web site, a patent entitled the “Acousto-Electromagnetic Hologistic Resonant System ” was awarded but there is no indication that commercial applications or proposed research have ever seen the light of day, not for that system or for any other.

Maurer had a UFO sighting in Portland in the early 1980s and he wanted to know “how it was done.” He and Miller developed plans for an interstellar spacecraft based on extrapolations from “fringe physics” and what he believed he had seen. The proposal was published as a book, “Quantum Electromagnetic Laser Propulsion,” and last year as a novel, “Debris.”

Kirsch attempts to render in pictures and brief commentary this complex project for a craft that would in effect become a single electron and tunnel through space-time. He creates some nice images to illustrate difficult ideas and reduces detailed arguments to bullet points and short paragraphs like those in a PowerPoint presentation. The project hinges, however, on arguments from quantum physics. Since I am no more a physicist than Kirsch, I looked for others more qualified to evaluate the claims.

Physicist Edward Halerewicz, Jr. conveniently took on that task and wrote an extensive review of “Quantum Electromagnetic Laser Propulsion.”  He also wrote a mathematical analysis of the specifications of the spacecraft, did a physical review of the vehicle and analyzed the magnetic field strength of the craft. He admires the audacity of a proposal for a vehicle that uses cutting-edge physics to make travel near the speed-of-light possible with present-day technology but notes that the book is essentially a promotional “gimmick” to fund the project and promote interest in UNITEL’s work.  Funding did not materialize, however, and efforts to convince investors and engineers have apparently not succeeded.

The review of quantum physics and mathematics necessary to understand Halerewicz’s argument is best done with the original documents which can be found at www.stealthskater.com. His conclusions, however, were unequivocal: “I am highly skeptical of most claims … and the equations are largely based on the assertions of UNITEL, not on ‘hard science.’”

In a letter to Maurer, Halerewicz said, “I don’t believe existing experiments prove that the propulsion concept would work.  If it were possible to “teleport” an apple from New York to Hawaii, you would have something.  But at present, there is only circumstantial evidence which backs the propulsion concept.  [Your proposal] …  reeks too much of perpetual motion.”

Because he was listed in a 2002 corporate document as a “technical consultant” of UNITEL, I also asked physicist Hal Puthoff, Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, for his opinion. Puthoff did have some early conversations with UNITEL – he responded politely to questions, that is – but never served as a paid consultant or provided professional services.  Speaking to what he saw six or eight years ago, he characterized their ideas as highly speculative, far beyond what was known or could be practically applied. Because their theoretical ideas could not be extrapolated from current knowledge, the proposal depended entirely on the ability to build something workable. Puthoff is radically open to possibilities because “experiment trumps theoretical expectation every time,” but to date, nothing has been demonstrated, only asserted.

Another scientist (who asked to remain anonymous) was approached by UNITEL and also rejected official status as a consultant, although he too was listed as one. There were severe difficulties with the concept, he said, and he could not connect the materials science behind the plans (his specialization) to the goal of intergalactic travel. It was not science, he concluded, but science fiction.

There are more conversations like that to report, but you get the idea. “This Way to the Stars” has a “cool factor,” the short book is fun to read, but until a tighter weave of theoretical and/or experimental data supports the extreme claims, the book is best cataloged as fiction, more like the Bob Lazar narrative than the balanced reasonable work of Paul Hill. I suggest that anyone interested in scientifically grounded speculation about “how we might get there” begin with Hill’s “Unconventional Flying Objects” – and also take courses in physics so that every exotic idea does not sound equal to every other.

Richard Thieme (www.thiemeworks.com) is an author and professional speaker focused on the deeper implications of technology, religion, and science for twenty-first century life. He addresses the challenges posed by new technologies, how to reinvent ourselves (as individuals or organizations) to meet these challenges, and practical approaches to
creativity, Email rthieme@thiemeworks.com for details.

Originally published in MUFON: The Mutual UFO Network Journal

Published by The Future Fire (2008.14), dedicated to “Social, Political, & Speculative Cyberfiction. An experiment in and celebration of new writing.” It’s s always a treat to be published in a magazine that you also like to read! The story was illustrated nicely by Chris Cartwright of Digital Design. See it at FutureFire.

This story is a chimera. All incidents, encounters, speculative or philosophical riffs, are based on actual events. To unify them on the three levels of the story – our relationship to “ultimate realities,” other intelligent life, and the intelligence community’s impact on its most committed professionals – they must be presented as fiction. “Fiction,” as the narrator says, “is the province of the fantastic ….”

The initial pages illuminate the state of the narrator’s mind on all three levels, lest they be thought extraneous … some editors did not understand how that constituted “fiction” rather than an essay. I suggested to one that he think of “Notes from Underground,” please, as an antecedent, and its two parts. He acknowledged that was fair, but still didn’t like the story. It made me wonder if anybody reads fiction from before 1960 these days; then I learned that one can get a degree in English literature at “good” universities without having to do so.

A dear friend, on the other hand, who spent decades as an intelligence professional, highly respected and honored by his peers, told me he kept saying, “Bingo!” as he read it. I guess it helps to understand the territory.

A riff on this text, a different way of saying it, call it what you will, Northward into the Night, is now making the rounds.

Less Than the Sum of the Movable Parts

by Richard Thieme

Nothing gets us through a long day more than an image of a constant self.

My life is one long day, so believe me, I know. It helps. Thinking that “I” was here “yesterday”, “I” am here “now”, “I” will be here “tomorrow”—it’s wonderful, isn’t it? Using an imaginary temporal index linked to a mirage of an equally illusive self to manage an inchoate flow of impressions which turn into pictures in the “mind” to simulate fixity?

I think it’s wonderful, anyway. I think it helps us stay engaged with tasks that might otherwise drive us to despair.

Or worse.

There’s a bigger question, however: is there a connection between the connections? A real one, I mean? A single template that works from top down, instead of bottom up?

Otherwise, it’s just a coding trick—memories encoded in chemicals programmed to disclose aspects of what we call “selves” like origami unfolding to that same subjective self. This recursive program would be a stroke of genius, if a genius existed. A reflexive self, embedded in its own structure, suggests continuity; seemingly real memories frame the phantom self like planes in a cubist painting constructing odd geometries—inside of which we, all unassuming, happily thrive.

Or—to put it another way—it thinks, therefore we are.

Or, in cases like mine, agencies think for us, relieving us of some of the work.

OK. We emerge from braided twists of code like cookies from flour water and sugar. But where does the recipe come from?

Well—who knows? Maybe it evolved. Maybe we were cooked up in a kitchen. I prefer fun hypotheses like Charles Fort’s. It sounded crazy when he said it; now it sounds reasonable, now that we know that UFOs are real and have been around for a long time. Fort, you recall, combed through newspapers and periodicals in the New York public library in the early twentieth century, filtering anomalies into his notebooks. Then he bound them into a vision. He suggested that we might be property, owned by an alien race. He didn’t know if they won us in a lottery, inherited the planet as part of a bequest, claimed us after a battle, or agreed to accept us in lieu of cash in a game of intergalactic poker. The reasons, whatever they may be, are unthinkable because we have no point of reference. They relate to memories in the storage banks of the alien race(s) linked by connections as invisible to us as dark matter. We don’t know if or how they design histories or store memories to preserve identities distributed through folds of space-time. We can’t even see them, much less understand how they evolved. We don’t even believe in them yet. All we can do is suppose that they, too, construct peculiar geometries in the blank space of the zero point field. Perhaps the multiverse unfolds in their imaginations like origami too, a multidimensional canvas on which they paint or sculpt the equivalent of art.

Who knows? Anyway, the first steps are the hardest: believing that they exist, and then, believing in our belief. At this point in time, we don’t believe. We believe in disbelief. By design, I believe.

In a court of law, lawyers tell me, three witnesses who say the same thing are considered the best evidence. Well, witnesses have testified to the presence of our watchers, owners or visitors, whatever they are, by the thousands. The data points are voluminous. They plot countless visits by beings in luminous discs, silent triangles or elongated craft with portholes; they have been documented for decades, perhaps centuries, they have been here anyway a long long time—they or their robots or clones—but we act as if they don’t exist. We can’t map what we can’t comprehend. We have impressions, images of conspicuous displays, stored in collective memory banks, but we turn them into myth. We make fiction instead of history. Fiction is the province of the fantastic and distracts us—and their manipulations of energy or matter seem fantastic, make no mistake. The effects we have observed imply an understanding that we can not apprehend. And they seem to hide and show themselves, they seem to play a game of cosmic boo and peek—but to what purpose?

Once again… who knows?

Anyway… the DNA came from somewhere. Whatever the source, perhaps our owners think of us as dairy farmers think of their herds. Perhaps they sip like emotional or intellectual milk our cultural excrescence which is useful in some way, or tasty, an occasional treat, a distraction from the task of searching for meaning. Maybe we add a page to the choral songbook of the multiverse. Maybe they feel affection when we head for the barn at the end of the day, the sun steeping the pasture with its lone oak tree slanting in shadow. Maybe the twilight sky that brightens before it fades is a liminal image that stirs them, too, a portal to something they have lost and can not recall.

Or maybe they are proud of our halting progress as parents delight in a child’s first steps, watching us splutter into our neighborhood in primitive machines, skipping to the moon or Mars like toddlers coming downstairs and walking around the block for the first time, seeing with wonder that there is something real indeed across the real street.

Seeing the street at the same time for the first time. Seeing the bridge and seeing the distant bank in the same moment.

We have been born or bred to believe we are individuals, discrete entities, selves with will, feeling and intention, and more than that, that we are the apple of God’s eye or—in a more secular vein—the top of the food chain, something special… instead of transient manifestations of energy and matter in complex relationship to everything else.

But it’s not true.

We are more mist than mountain, more metaphor than mist.

Disorienting, isn’t it, thinking like this? It gives me a headache too. Better to believe our beliefs, believe we are the selves that we experience reflexively as points of reference for the shifting contours of our so-called interior lives.

The task then is to manage the threat of chaos. There are three ways to do this: the Small Way, the Big Way, and the Biggest Way. My colleagues see management of the Small Way as their job. We leave the Big Way to visitors by default. The Biggest Way, we leave to It.

Okay. So… are we the sum of our moveable parts?

Who knows? And does it matter? We will do what we do, think as we think, regardless, take comfort in what we call “cultures” which like “selves” exist as higher branches on a fractal tree and also seem to be sums of, more or less, all of their moveable parts.

The machinery breathes. That’s what matters. People believe in their beliefs.

I was walking home the other night at dusk. It is November, and the weather is changing. The dry leaves of maple and ash and oak were blowing on the pavement, the bare branches of trees clean and leafless against a luminous sky. Clouds streamed from the northwest, obscuring moon and stars, low clouds illuminated by light from the distant city. The road was empty. There are no streetlights in the village, and I trusted the pattern of the pavement to channel my walking toward the bridge across the ravine without bumping into something or stumbling into the shallow ditch along the road.

High on the right, through a tall hedge marking a line of property, windows blazed from a mansion built to the right scale for the land. It was an old home, brick and stone, and its high windows glowed. I flashed back to a cold night when I was a child sent to buy a loaf of bread at a commissary in a high rise. The white bread was in a paper sack in my gloved hands, and coming back, the wind stinging my cheeks, I saw through the blurry prisms of my tears high on the right the bright window of a mansion above an elaborate entrance. Through the window a portrait on the wall of a library filled with books lining shelves from ceiling to floor, a woman in a dress in a chair in a golden frame, a picture light illuminating the portrait, the bright window signifying a refuge. A nexus. A place. A node. A home.

That mansion is gone. It was torn down years ago to make way for a high rise, a glass stack of lighted windows fronting the city on the dark water. Now a bluish candescence spills through glass walls floor-to-ceiling into the night and dissipates before it reaches the ground.

The image of that mansion is a memory, don’t you see, a chemical trace. There’s nothing there. The house no longer exists. It never did. Oh, something was there, once upon a time, something that we agree to call a mansion, but I don’t know what it was. Or what kind of life was lived inside. Or who that woman was. And neither do you. You think you know but you don’t.

You believe in your beliefs.

We presume so much, don’t we? We presume everything. These little slides or luminous images in our minds are slotted into a matrix made to hold them like tiny panes of painted glass, buttressing the belief that we inhabited a past and that the past existed. We believe in the reality of vanished landscapes.

If history is a symphony played in a hall with dead spaces, so are individual lives. The chemical bonds between memories weaken, bleed into one another, leak through once-firm walls of cells of a database housing a house of self. The diminishment of memory contrasts with the illusion of fixity of purpose and self-definition that sustained us. The terminator, the line on the moon where darkness meets the light, throws mountains into sharp relief, but the light and darkness on either side of the line are absolute. Only by contrast do we see anything at all, and then, only for a moment.

The darkness and light, as the man said, are one.

A plumb line of gravity sinks as a point of reference for the floor on which we think we walk. Everything, it seems. We are always in freefall in the deep well of the night. We project imaginary patterns onto stars but cannot see our nearest neighbors, even when they cross the street and walk into our yard. We see them if at all through a glass darkly. Civilizations more ancient than we can imagine, invisible because they are unthinkable.

“Ants can’t get that dogs exist.”

That’s what the professor said.

The professor is also named Paul. When I last saw him, he sank into the billowing cushions of his immense wing chair. His white hair flamed from his face like Einstein’s. He is more massive than Brando, he is huge, but embarrassed by the obsession with obesity. It’s only a fad, he says, dismissing it with a wave. Then reaches for something to nibble on, something to suck.

The professor is a loveable cuss who cannot stop looking. He says he’s retired but doesn’t know how. He can’t help it. He still wants to know. He calls it blessing or curse, depending. What else would I do? he asks in mock exasperation. Play golf?

The idea is funny. I imagine clubs like little sticks in his huge hands, his enormous bulk as solid as a building as he whiffs. I laugh.

The professor is always in the grip of some confounding event. He thrives on irregular shapes, feeling rough edges with his fingers, liking the occasional ouch. He wouldn’t know what to do with a smooth surface or a curve that didn’t challenge him. He prefers to live in hair shirts of perpetual perplexity. Itchiness makes him feel alive.

His eyes often look into the distance. Sometimes people turn to see what he is looking at and can’t see anything at all.

On the other hand, the professor often trips over his own feet.

He obsesses about our owners. He knows they come and go. He has been immersed in the data for decades. He has written hundreds of papers, good ones with careful documentation, reasonable conclusions, and of course, he is ignored. His work is published in periodicals that nobody reads. He lectures to empty rooms but no one puts it on YouTube.

He doesn’t know how long they stay or to what end. Even if we analyzed the metal from a crash or their flesh, it does not tell us anything important. We can do that analysis, it is well within our competence, but to what end? We want to know the story, and the story is a muddle without a point of reference. Where’s the narrative? That’s what we need. A narrative, not abstractions. They seem to want to make it a muddle too and so do we, our own people, guardians of the interface, he winks, meaning our colleagues, who muddle the muddle more.

Ideas can be as alive as people, more alive than some. The people who appointed themselves guardians of the interface, keepers of the secrets, do nothing but dream them up. They invent and alter and manage perceptions and images and ideas in the battle space of our minds. They create relationships between things, then fill in the blanks.

Most keep the faith and die in silence. But once in a while one will have misgivings. Then there’s a crack and a little light gets in, as the song says. Someone gets an itch that has to be scratched.

My friend—call him Herb—is a social scientist. Like the professor, Herb is a tenured academic. But he has worked on contract for years. People like Herb say they distrust us but believe me, they’re easier to recruit than hookers. They talk the talk, but they always take the money.

Herb looks like an academic. Can you picture one? Got it? That’s Herb.

Much of his research has been funded in the dark. Of course, a lot of research in social sciences has been done that way for fifty years; everything is dual use, there are always plausible reasons, and then there are the ways the “intelligence community” as we call it with a laugh can use it, too.

You think I am alluding to something small. You have no idea. We have spun a vast dark web for generations through media, research in and out of industry, entertainment, universities—you cannot imagine how vast it is. Because they turn everything typical into an anomaly. That keeps you from seeing it whole. You never see it all mapped out.

Try. Go ahead. Try to imagine how big it is.

See what I mean? You can’t even come close.

Herb works in the blur between social and psychological, looking for means of manipulation, although he doesn’t call it that, and partners with experts in particle beams, lasers, electromagnetic energy—there are many interesting effects. Like stopping people in their tracks. Making them vomit. Or heat up. Or their brains go fuzzy. Or putting voices in their heads.

Memory, too. Herb works with memory. It’s a passion, not a duty. He works with individual memories, not “memory” in the abstract. He makes memories and he makes memories go away. Or he keeps them intact but breaks up the index so they can’t be retrieved without a good program. You have to know the code that unlocks the code. Herb can intensify some memories and reduce the intensity of others. It’s like using a mixer, he says, recording a song. A little more bass, a little less trumpet, and you wouldn’t know it’s the same song.

‘Of Mice and Men’, he calls his current research.

Herb can make mice forget what they just learned. It looks like magic if you don’t know the science. He distinguishes short term and long term encoded proteins and plays games with them. He has a blast. His playground is small at the moment, just little mice minds, but as Herb said the other night, looking at the streetlight refracted through his glass of sherry, “Just you wait.” Then smiled at me and I smiled back.

His wine looked like liquid ruby from across the study. The wind rattled the ornamental shutters on his three story brick colonial home. His neighbor had raked that afternoon but the leaves blew from his piles onto Herb’s lawn. We could see the leaves swirling in the wind. A neighbor was waiting for his dog, scooper in one hand and leash in the other. The dog was a blur. Then the man and the dog moved away, their distorted images flowing along the thick panes of antique glass.

Herb sipped his sherry and smiled again. He and his colleagues had moved a memory from the brain of one mouse to the brain of another. Then they distributed memories randomly in a dozen mice, busting up the culture in a way, the group still knowing everything but not in the same way. The different juxtaposition in time and space changed the frame. The memories could all be retrieved and resequenced in the proper order, restoring the right tilt to the world. But as I said, you had to know the code.

But that wasn’t why he wanted to talk. That was gossip. He invited me over because he had an itch he needed to scratch. When he turned at last to the subject on his mind, his smile faded.

Herb had been invited somewhere for the weekend. They came through a friend with a channel to the place for the meeting. They wanted to discuss disclosure. That’s all he would say. A tap on the shoulder came like an invitation to Skull and Bones, and off he went. A weekend away, expenses paid. He never says no. When he flies, sometimes windows are blacked out. Sometimes elevators take a long time to go down. You can’t even see the road into the mountain, that’s how good they are. Google Earth is their toy, too, and all the mapping platforms, so unless you have your own satellites, or code to correct the altered images, you haven’t got a reference—don’t you see?—so you can’t really see the earth. All you see is the floor they have given you, seemingly concrete.

A weekend away with men and women from diverse disciplines was a treat. There were several dozen, I think he said. Or did I fill in a blank? We make connections without thinking, fill in the blank spaces. Without thinking consciously, I ought to say. Narratives complete themselves. No, I think he did say a couple of dozen. The agenda at any rate was simple: should they tell? They talked over the pros and cons. How long can we sit on this? How long should we? More people know now, despite our work, how well we have hidden it all in plain sight, but they don’t know that they know. That’s the kicker. Some know but don’t know that they know.

But—how long should we keep it up?

Then their facilitator said—now, this is a direct quote, and Herb looked perplexed as he said it, his affect appropriate to the words—”What will the cattle do? Will they stay inside the fence or will they stampede?”

Hm. I see that the metaphor cattle might be confusing. I use “cattle” as a metaphor again, but not the way I meant before. The cattle to which I am referring here is the whole herd of humanity, the mass of all humankind, our shared mental space. Not the cattle I meant before, when I said that we humans might look to our owners like cows. Then I meant cows. That was a simile. This is a metaphor. That was speculation. This is historical fact.

So let me back up and say it again.

One morning my friend Herb received a call. There is going to be a meeting, he was told. People will come together. Then the meeting will not have happened. There will be no minutes, no memory of the meeting.

We need to discuss disclosure—again. Again we must make a decision.

Your expenses, he was told, will be paid as usual through the Department of International Studies at Oberlin. They will request a paper and you will send one. It won’t be published so it doesn’t matter which.

Then the caller became serious. Things have been warming up. You understand what I mean? Yes, exactly. We don’t know how hot it will get. It’s not in our control.

The question is, has it percolated long enough through the mind of the herd to bring us to a tipping point? Will people understand and adjust? Or will they go through the barb wire?

I did it again. That wasn’t much help, was it? Of course you don’t know that point of reference, either. How could you? It’s from another story. So let’s go there, okay? It’s a detour, but the shortest route to all goals is the detours.

Once upon a time, I was waiting at a neighborhood bank—it doesn’t matter, but it happened to be Midwest Bank, a local institution with a dozen branches. I have lunch with some of the officers now and again at a nearby club. Some play tennis, we all play cards. I was waiting that day to renew a CD. A new vice president was helping me, middle aged, mostly bald, a little fringe of gray and darker hair, a paunch pushing at the tight belt of his not very expensive suit, starting to edge over the belt like a shelf. He was friendly enough, the kind of fellow who might manage the branch someday; he was processing papers to renew my CD. A sheet of paper and a couple of cards were on the glass top of his desk. His eyes moved back and forth between a computer screen I couldn’t see and a pad on which he made notations. We chatted as he calculated interest.

My last conversation with the professor—we had gone to a local casino and walked in winding paths among the noisy slots, turning this way and that as we talked, altering the curve of the interface, in case—was on my mind. In the past, I wouldn’t have said anything. But now, I’m old enough so I don’t care. Let people think I am crazy. Besides, it’s part of the job, part of the latest persona. My current job is thinking about things and saying stuff. At least, that’s how it looks. Like Paul the professor, my puppet “Paul” is intended to look creative, eccentric, be genius-level at times, but always what up here they call “different.”

So as I waited I said to Glen, that’s the new V-P, I said, Glen, you know, I read this article the other day, and told him about the sighting I heard from the professor how pilots and air traffic controllers and radar stations all reported the same thing, how huge the thing had to have been to make a blip like that, how huge in fact it was according to both pilots, they literally soiled themselves, I said, and he nodded, filling in my name on a blank.

We had something happen on our farm, once.

Oh? I said.

Yes, he scribbled on a card, up north, on the family farm. One night this trooper came speeding along the road chasing after this bright light flying low along the hills. The thing glowed with incredible intensity, not like something with a light, but like the thing itself glowed from the inside out. It was white but it was so white, the purest white light, and he skidded to a stop, which is when we heard him outside on the loose gravel and went out to see. This thing whatever it was had apparently come down behind our barn. The trooper was a guy we knew, everybody knew Luke, he was standing at the open door of his prowler, behind the door like he was hunkering down, looking at this bright light behind our barn illuminating trees and everything back there. We stood there looking at it with him for a long time. He told us he chased this thing from the other side of town through town and out along the highway by our farm.

Are you going to go back there? I asked.

Hell, no, he shook his head. No way in hell he’d go back there alone.

Then whatever it was suddenly rose up so silent and it moved fast so we couldn’t really see or it disappeared. But one minute this bright white light was hovering over the barn and then it was up there looking like a star and then we couldn’t see it anymore. It was like night descended suddenly upon the house, the pasture, on us, everything, and everything was still again. Then the insects started chirping and we realized they had stopped.

I’ll never forget it, he said. He turned two cards toward me and handed me a pen. I signed the cards on the lines at the X.

That was the end of it, then?

Well, no, he said, see, the next morning we went out behind the barn to see was anything there, and we found broken branches in kind of a circle like something had snapped them off, grass scorched and the edges of the branches burnt too and some of the leaves.

But—do you know much about cattle?

I shook my head.

He said, something scared hell out of the cattle. Cattle know about barb wire. They know what it is. But that night, so many of our cows went through the barb wire, they went right through it, they tore themselves up so bad, udders and all; we had to destroy most of them, they were so cut up.

Nobody ever saw anything like it.

He folded the CD and put it in a plastic sleeve.

OK. So I told you the name of the bank where we had this conversation. I can tell you we put money into that bank or another, but money is another null set, isn’t it? Money doesn’t exist, either. Money is energy stored in a form we pretend. We act like money is real, interest will be paid, businesses exist, and that’s the thing—it’s all held together by couplers that are imperfect but good enough and it stays together because nobody pulls at it too hard.

You don’t want something scaring hell out of the cattle so they go right through the barb wire and cut themselves to pieces and have to be put down.

Anyway, that’s what the facilitator meant when he said about cattle, will they stay inside the fence or stampede? He meant what Glen at the bank meant but Glen meant real cows.

So Herb went to the meeting. Now, I know Herb. I know him as well as one can know another. Or oneself, as I have been saying. Herb went to the meeting intending to weigh in on the side of telling people everything. It’s our planet, he said. People have a right to know what’s happening. It’s time, he chimed like he was an alarm and humanity a clock. Like he knew all about it.

Then he went to the meeting. And when he came back—I never saw anything like it. He had turned completely around. He went away one hundred per cent in favor of disclosure. He came back just as adamant against.

I asked him what he had heard that changed his mind but he wouldn’t say. Well, I asked, who was there? He wouldn’t say. I wouldn’t say, myself. Lots of different ones, he said. Most knew a lot more about it than me. He was leaning forward in his wing chair looking like that trooper might have looked, as I imagine him looking in the memory of Glen the vice president of the bank, staring at the light behind the barn.

He wouldn’t face me exactly. His gaze was at an angle. He was looking out the window but looking at nothing. There was nothing there to see.

That’s all I’m going to say, he said. Then he said, they’re afraid it won’t hold.

What won’t?

He looked at me with sorrow and I believe pity.

Paul, we wake up and get dressed and go to work. We have breakfast and watch TV. We buy stuff and cut the grass. It’s the little things, the things you can’t make people do. They have to want to do them. They have to believe in them. They have to believe in their beliefs.

The way we do it, it’s good enough, it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough. You know that. We can’t take the chance.

He sat back, sinking into the billowing cushions of his immense chair. His white hair flamed from his face like Einstein’s. I knew why he was upset. And he knew I knew why. The loop completed, as it will.

Is it just chemical, I wondered, looking at it from the outside? Looking at Herb leaning in his chair, looking at how I must have looked, looking at Herb. The way fear is transmitted, I mean? Is it some primordial pheromone that triggers fight-or-flight? That makes the hair stand up on the back of the neck? The heart race and the palms sweat?

That makes us want to get out while we can?

Except that what we’re in is ourselves. And there are no boundaries between us. Each the bridge, each the other side.

And we’re in it together. Us and them and then some.

Old men have the luxury of telling the truth because no one pays attention. Old men are irrelevant to currents of action, reflection beside the point when life is brutish.

People concede to us wisdom or perspective only because they don’t matter.

It was right around that time, if I remember correctly, that I met Susan for lunch in Chicago. I have known Susan for years. Susan is a social worker which can mean lots of things. She worked for community services for a while, had a stint at County Hospital, and I think she worked for a time at New Life Counseling Center. Now she works mostly with addicted women who get beaten up a lot. She has done it for some time so she must have learned how to use herself as a tool and still go home, kick off her shoes, and watch TV the rest of the night.

We had lunch at a trendy restaurant on the near north side. We laughed when we read the names of the fancy vegetables. “California stuff,” I said, looking at a waiter setting down a plate of white and pale green stalks and leaves.

Susan had a sandwich with three kinds of cheese and asparagus and a red paste on yellow bread with lots of seeds. The little bit of salad on the side was full of curled greens and coiled carrots. I went for something hot. I had my leather coat zipped up the whole time. I was still cold from walking from my car in that wind.

Susan looked good. She sounded solid. She was into a new relationship so she was hopeful—again. She usually picked horses that came out of the gate strong but faded in the stretch.

I listened a lot and seldom spoke, nodding to indicate what she called “empathetic listening.” Through the plate glass window the gray sky had lost all definition. The discoloration became rain and then the rain turned into snow. There was sleet too and slush along the sidewalks by the time we finished eating, ankle-deep and cold. Susan had parked in front of the bistro and drove me to my car parked a couple of blocks away.

My cold feet flexed in my wet shoes as she turned on the heater. The sleet squeaked on her worn wipers. She turned all the way around to pull out and went slowly down the narrow street.

There it is, I said.

That one? I was looking for the Ford.

The Ford’s long gone. There was even a Mazda between.

She pulled in behind the old Toyota and turned off the wipers. The end of the scraping sounded good. Sleet ran in thick rivulets down the clean windshield.

Susan continued to talk about what she wanted to do next, wondering was it too late, and should she give this guy a chance? Elmo was his name of all things. Maybe it was made up.

She lowered her window an inch or two, letting the car idle and keeping the heater on. Warm air flowed from the vents while a thin stream of cold air from the open window felt like white icing on a cake.

It was one of those conversations. You can’t make it happen, but when it does, you don’t ever want it to stop. First, there was the meal, hot chowder and crab cakes for me, fresh hot bread with drizzle to dip, a delicious sauvignon blanc from Cloudy Bay, the chatter and glasses and silver around us at precisely the right level. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time, and it felt so good just to be with her, eating quietly, taking our time, letting the ambient noise be a cushion for the pauses. It was like a real community filling in the blanks so we didn’t have to do everything ourselves. Beyond Susan at the next table, a young couple were playing footsie, the movements of the draped cloth betraying their game, looking at each other with little smiles. Made me nostalgic. Outside, the snow and sleet were really coming down, the snow blowing slantwise across the window and people hurrying through the mess, holding their coats closed at the collar, dipping their heads in the bitter wind when they had to wait for a light. But we were inside, warm and dry. Susan talked on as she often did about her life. I had heard a lot of it before. It wasn’t what we talked about so much as knowing one another for all those years.

Sitting in the car afterward, I thought I was doing OK, nodding a lot like I said, paying attention most of the time, when she turned off the heater and gave me a look.

“You haven’t said much about your work.”

“Oh?” I shrugged. “I told you some things, what I could, what I thought you might find interesting.”

“Paul,” she said, her eyes not letting me off the hook. “Paul, you told me you were talking to people who were tortured. You were working with people doing it, too. You told me about it last time. How it affected them. Then you were off about where the planet might be headed, other kinds of life forms and God only knows what. But I keep going back to what you said about the Turks. And the Uzbeks. It was chilling.”

I shrugged and shivered. I leaned over and turned on the heater.

“The techniques aren’t the thing. It’s pretty cut and dried.”

She looked at me for a long time.

“Paul,” she said, reaching and taking my hand. “Do you remember what you said once? About people going over the line?”

I did, but forgot I had said it.

“I guess.”

“Paul—you’re over the line.”

I had a sinking feeling and looked down at her hands. Her hands are where the aging showed most.

“You told me yourself, you don’t know how to talk to normal people anymore. You don’t share their points of reference.”

I turned to look outside. “I said that?”

“Yes,” she smiled, getting inside. “You said you live in a world that people don’t want to know. You didn’t want to talk about it, either, but you did, some. Do you think I would forget something like that? Do you think I can’t see what’s going on?”

“Why? What am I doing?”

“Oh, Paul,” she sighed. “For someone so smart, you sure can be dumb. Do you remember the books I gave you on trauma? How it affects people?”

“Sure.” I nodded. “I read some of it. It was interesting.”

“Why do you think I asked you to do that?”

I shrugged again. “Because the people I talk to, whether its ones doing interrogation, or ones who have been worked on, or ones who have had encounters, or the ones who keep the interface, manage the deception, whoever it is, they all show signs of trauma, right? You wanted me to understand what symptoms they would have.”

“Yes, but why else?”

I shrugged a final time. “I don’t know.” I was truly blank.

“Because,” she said, squeezing my hand, “you’re showing symptoms too. From listening. It’s almost the same as being there.”

I guess it was obvious to her, doing the work she does. But have you ever not known something so completely that when someone says it, the recognition of it is like all of the air rushing out of the room? You can’t breathe, you can’t even think of breathing. Then, when you do speak, your emotions are so raw, like someone sank a shaft and hit oil, because they have been buried for so long, you can feel the sobbing rising inside but refuse to let it out.

Susan could feel it, too. She took my other hand and I saw she had lost weight. I noticed for the first time that her navy skirt didn’t pucker as much on her belly.

“Paul, you can’t not know what you know. You can’t unlearn it. It’s who you are. But part of you must know what it does to you.”

I nodded. She was wearing a ring, not an engagement. Then I looked up into the deep well of her eyes.

Everything let go.

“Do you have any idea what we do? Or what they do? Or how long it’s been going on? Do you have any idea who we are? How much we are not what you think? Or who you think?”

She had unleashed a beast and realized it now. The fear in her eyes was evident.

She shook her head. “Do I want to know?” She had lost the offensive and knew it. She was looking for a place to hide. I watched her cover and duck.

“I’m concerned with what it’s doing to you. You say you kind of retired but you still talk to all these people, and –”

“No,” I shook my head. “You think you’re concerned but you don’t know. You don’t know. You’re concerned about the wrong things. That’s how it’s designed, Susan.”

The floor on the deep well of the night gave way. Her eyes darted back and forth looking for something to hold. During that transient glimpse into my life, into all life, she understood, felt it like a sudden chill and almost went into panic mode. She almost headed for the barb wire. Then her eyes shifted from my face to the window where snow was dropping from the trees and she found a reprieve. Everyday people passed on the walk in overcoats and parkas, a woman tottered by in sheer hose and four inch heels, comic relief, watching her step through the melting slush. Behind her, the old stone of a brownstone mansion was whitened by snow blowing off the roof. Susan saw as she tilted her head and looked up an elegant doorway with its black wrought iron gate and above it a second story window blazing with electric light.

“Paul—” she said.

I shook my head.

“Susan, my name isn’t Paul. It never was.”

She looked for a connection. That’s what people do. Try to plug in.

“I remember a few years ago,” she almost laughed although nothing was funny. “Someone called you Herb. You made a joke of it, saying they were getting old.”

I shook my head again. “It isn’t Paul and it isn’t Herb. And I am not a professor. I never was.”

After thirty-seven years. Thirty-seven years.

“I’ve had so many names, Susan, I can’t remember them all.”

She let my hands loose and they came back to my side of the car. I believed she accepted my confession and all of the things that it shattered with professional equanimity. So I leaned closer, hoping to hold her in my arms. I wanted to feel her and inhale her scent. I wanted her warmth. That was all. I just wanted to be close. But the fracture was too abrupt. In the moment, I thought I confessed in order to be real, but as she drew back, her eyes receding into the distance, I realized that she saw more clearly than I ever would that I had, as always, simply needed to prevail.

by Richard Thieme

“When you think about it – I mean, really step back and think about it – the reaction, I mean, to Dennis Kucinich’s statement the other night during the Democratic debate, about seeing an aerial vehicle, a large dark triangle, something reported by many people in this and other countries and probably one of our own, one of our new stealthy inventions, but one he couldn’t identify – the fact that it was brought up as it was, to ridicule a man whose candidacy has already been made to seem silly, a waste of time and money – and then more ridicule and disdain, after the debate, the thigh-slapping laughter of a loud shouter like Chris Matthews who hooted and hollered and asked other candidates like Joe Biden did they “believe” in UFOs as if this alone of all domains is not a question of evidence, thinking about it all, but a belief like leprechauns or Santa Claus or God – and then, when Governor Richardson of New Mexico stated the obvious, that there is a documented record that our government has withheld information about the subject for decades – not months, not years, but decades – his quiet statement caused the already wildly raving Matthews to get even louder and wilder, demanding to know, my god man, do you think there was a cover-up? a cover-up? And all this said not simply with confidence, but with arrogance fused with ignorance, as if we do not live in a secrecy-shrouded world in which millions and millions of government documents, even when they have been declassified, will not emerge into the light of day for years – years! – a world in which statesmen like the late Senator Patrick Moynihan wrote an entire book about the negative impact of obsessive secrecy (and that was before the Cheney-Bush regime took it up another notch) and how unnecessary secrecy eroded the fabric of a once-open society – I mean, when you think about all that, while the rest of us live our lives downwind in the bluster of the loud shouters screaming their beliefs as if they were part of a civil discourse or a civilized debate – well, all a member of the hidden crowd can do is laugh or weep or perhaps wonder what in the name of God is going on?

I mean, think about it. Mention the silly distractions used to draw the scent into the bushes, nonsense like Britney Spears or the Hilton woman or the dead one, what was her name, now, Anna Nicole, just bring them up, I say, and you’ll get hours of silly discourse, pundits and news anchors and bloggers taking the silly nothings so seriously, playing hand-in-glove games with their publicists, as if such trivia has anything to do with anything real or anything that matters at all, making the silly film Idiocracy seem like a pretty good forecast of things to come, no, things already here.

You understand, it did not just happen. UFOs were not ridiculed when they were covered as news, years ago. As well they ought to have been. Anomalous vehicles having their way and will with our skies, showing up as Look Magazine documented over nuclear plants like Hanford and air force bases all over the country – that’s news, or ought to be. Vehicles behaving in ways that led Life Magazine to conclude, with an in-depth article using official quotes, that the vehicles which had been photographed and documented by official USAF cameras, were in all likelihood extraterrestrial.

Because, given what they did and how they did it, what else could they be?

But you wouldn’t know that, would you? You wouldn’t know that there exists a voluminous amount of data, an immense historical documentation going back into the nineteen thirties, long before the so-called “modern UFO era” had begun, filled with credible observers who were flying fighters or commercial planes or simply looking up or straight ahead, sometimes, at something landing, something alive coming out, then taking off again and disappearing so quickly it made their hair stand up. To observe that this history exists and is well-documented by serious researchers, that historical studies like Keith Chester’s Strange Company, a book that compiles reports mostly from Europe before the second world war and then, during and after the war, or historical articles by Michael Swords, a retired professor from the University of Western Michigan, documenting for example the Robertson Panel, a group that established CIA-supported debunking and ridicule of reports, keeping them out of the mainstream news, or the Condon Committee, a “scientific” panel intended to settle the matter once and for all, the conclusions of which however contradicted the data in its own report, as if the committee did not even read its own work, and indeed, the chair had declared his conclusion with a chuckle and a wink long before the committee had done its work – one could go on and on, there are many serious well-researched works that document the phenomena, and the obviously successful campaign by the US government to use ridicule above all to make the whole domain a matter of jokes and precisely the kind of silliness for which we can thank Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, and their pals, who have never seen much less read any of this serious work, or the other accounts that accurately describe the cottage industry of useful idiots, pathological liars, con artists and flimflam men (and women, of course), making multiple points about the real serious research, as well as the ways that psychological operations and propaganda have been carried out for many years, addressed to the people of this country of necessity in addition to “enemies,” the stated targets of deception, it now being impossible to distinguish one from the other in a world of ubiquitous information.

The subject, in short, is complex, vast, and worthy of study.

So I ask, once again – what is it about UFOs that makes them such a subject of ridicule when patently ridiculous subjects like Hilton and Spears are treated with respect and amplified by the loud shouters?

A friend who spent his life at the National Security Agency doing analysis said to me once, speaking of the practice of deception – “Illusion, misdirection, and ridicule, these three. But the greatest of these is ridicule.”

His echo of the Apostle Paul was deliberate. This was the Gospel according to the IC, the world of professional intelligence.

Ridicule. The greatest of these is ridicule.

Indeed, people fear ridicule more than death, it seems. The dismemberment of their reputations, careers, and self-images is a grave threat. The thought police know this, of course. The art and science of the intentional destruction of troublesome human beings is alive and well.

The blow-back, however, as our intel friends call the unintended consequences of a sanctioned campaign, is the destruction of civil discourse, the undermining of a public space in which serious subjects receive the attention they deserve. Because so many people do not believe the official truth but don’t know what the truth might be. They know they are lied to much of the time, but don’t know what’s so, so they fill the empty space with projections, confabulations, nightmares and dreams.

There is more to it than that, of course. There is also a threat to the unspoken compacts that keep society hanging together, the ones that get people out of bed in the morning to go to work, not money or other rewards, but how a society functions at its deepest levels. The threat is that a superior civilization exists not “out there” where SETI serenely searches for distant signals, officially sanctioned and signifying nothing, but right here, up close, where thousands of credible witnesses have testified to the presence of anomalous vehicles obviously directed remotely or on the spot by intelligent agents, right here on our very own planet, not the isolated little blue marble in space that we collectively imagine, but one of many inhabited planets, where our society has against all evidence been built on a cornerstone of key beliefs, say them how you will – for religious, that we are the apple of God’s eye, not one apple among many, but the most favored nation, and for non-religious, that our species is the top of the food chain, the obviously smartest and best of all species, kings of the kingdom and queens of the realm. The threat is to the threads that stitch together our particular ways of being a self-conscious collective entity into a cultural myth of priority, invincibility, being the favored children of God. Now, this is a serious threat, along with the other lesser threats, to our dominance of other countries, scientific prowess, and other key pieces of the way we perceive ourselves in this nation. … and so we come back to UFOs, which have been well-documented, as I said, noted all over the world, in most countries, not just here, for sixty, seventy years, or more, behaving in the same ways, doing similar things, all reported by diverse peoples of all cultures and tribes and ages noting the same small details – that’s not the stuff of insanity, is it? That is something serious, something real, something worthy of scientific study and discussion in the public domain, not only behind closed doors where the masters of deception do indeed practice their dark arts on behalf of multiple agendas which have neither been floated nor voted upon by we, the people, the impotent watchers in the wings, we who ought to know better when the shouters do their job, we who know we have listened for years to lies yet still, like children, believe them because we must, so when they ridicule their victims, pumping up the abuse to effective levels, we must jump on the wagon at once, lest we be ridiculed too by Official Truth. We choose to believe the illusions, to look away from the real, knowing what we are doing, but so afraid of what they’ll say and do if we don’t.

The greatest of these is ridicule. Ridicule is King. And we, good subjects and loyal, obey the King.

The Second Edition is a periodic reflection by author and speaker Richard Thieme. Subscribe (or unsubscribe) by writing to rthieme@thiemeworks.com and stating subscribe (or unsubscribe).

Richard Thieme (www.thiemeworks.com) speaks and writes about the issues of our times, with an emphasis on technology, media, security, intelligence, and spirituality in all of their human and cultural dimensions.

The Swiss Cheese School of Investigative Reporting

There are many more holes here than substance. The book depicts the author’s journey, including a number of meetings with anonymous sources that lead to nothing newsworthy, and is not a coherent well-researched account of UFO phenomena or its many subsets (black budget research, disinformation deception and cover stories for classified research, aerospace technologies, immense amounts of UFO data from the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies, research into metamaterials, nanotechnology and cloaking technologies, the psychology sociology and spirituality of UFO investigation and reporting, etc, etc.) so the reader who does not have a broad understanding of the field and its several subcultures will be left more confused and uninformed than when s/he began the book. I understand the publishing pressures to bring such an incomplete account into print and sell the TV and movie rights, in the hope that an X-files-like narrative may result, but the book does not even lend itself to that. Suggestions of conspiracy are light and fluffy, despite the evidence in the book itself for disinformation and intentional confusion on a meaningful scale – and for good reasons. This book shows why a domain that is nine tenths under the water lends itself to just about anybody and everybody saying anything and everything. The bad thing about that is that it might suggest to the uninformed that there is nothing worth investigating. These few dots are not connected to each other or to the many other dots that might suggest plausible and meaningful patterns – patterns that are not simply imposed on the data but are suggested by it as hypotheses worth exploring.

“Space travel is utter bilge.”

– The Royal Astronomer in England, 1956, the year before the launch of Sputnik

The local CBS news (Channel 5/58) had a feature this week on UFOs over Wisconsin.

It was different than the usual silly <wink wink> kind of feature that passes for UFO news on most mainstream media. The few people interviewed actually sounded intelligent and sane, saying “This is what I saw” or showing videos of unidentified lights in the sky that appeared to behave in unusual ways. Observers acknowledged that they did not know what they saw, which is why the dancing lights remain unidentified.

The feature also mentioned observation of  UFOs at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport recently, observations by qualified people. But then the story is, as usual, dropped.

The question asked by those of us who have read and researched this subject seriously for decades is, of course, why? Why is Anna Nicole Smith and the diapered astronaut given so much overage while an event of relative importance is ridiculed, dismissed, or not covered at all?

I examine in the most conservative way some of these questions in my essay “Are There UFOs on Mars?” which can be found at my web site, along with more than a dozen interview with physicists, astronauts, NASA professionals, and other sane qualified people about the subject. (see www.thiemeworks.com and follow the links).

The subject is a big one. “UFO phenomena” covers all sorts of observations and events, ranging from secret projects, cover stories used as disinformation to protect the guilty (the Russian nuclear event, for example, that was covered up with a UFO story), all sorts of natural anomalous phenomena caused by magnetic fields, plasmas, high atmosphere electric phenomena, and so on and so forth.

But the only reason most people explore the domain at all is because of the suggestion that some UFO observations strongly suggest the sustained surveillance (at the least) of our planet by other space-faring species—that the extraterrestrial hypothesis, in short,  is the least unlikely hypothesis, as a government report said in the nineteen fifties.

Now, in any other domain, from Anna Nicole Smith to magnetic fields, research money would flow through white, gray or black budgets to explore the evidence. Only UFO phenomena is universally ignored—at least in the public domain.

After decades of examining the subject, the most reasonable explanation is that, in fact, the subject has not been ignored at all. But the research has been hidden in other scientific categories. As Northwestern University professor and astronomer J. Allen Hynek was told off the record at the Pentagon by a general, “Do you really think we would ignore something like this?”

He meant, at that time, the military threat and potential of technologies far superior to our own.

At that time, too, reports of what those anomalous vehicles did were ridiculed as “beyond science.” They included cloaking technologies, which prevented vehicles from showing up on radar; laser beams, particle beams, and other “ray weapons” including paralyzing and heat beams as defensive and offensive devices; electronic warfare of the most sophisticated kinds, including interference with cars, planes and missiles in flight, as well as shutting down launch codes in missile sites in this country and others. All or most of those well-documented effects were called “Buck Rogers science fiction” but are now in our arsenals or within our grasp, only one generation later.

Some believe that our development of these weapons was seeded and/or motivated by observation of these then-anomalous technologies. If so, there is a tried and true method for doing that—see my short story, “ZeroDay: Roswell” in the current issue of Porcupine, a wonderful magazine of literature and arts published in Cedarburg Wisconsin, for a fictional treatment of that process.

But what I really want to say is this:

The first time my understanding of UFO phenomena shifted from interesting and spooky to physical and real was in 1978. I was a newly ordained Episcopal priest in my first parish, a small one in northern Utah on the edge of Hill Air Force Base. Our senior warden, or congregational lay leader, was a major, although he retired as a heavily decorated bird colonel. He was highly esteemed and honored by both those he saved in Viet Nam and the brass who gave him medals. If anyone had the “right stuff,” that cocky fighter pilot did.

We were sitting alone in the church basement talking about “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” a recent movie then, and I said, “Bob, you know, I read people like Hynek and others who have done their best (in the fifties, sixties and seventies) to find out what UFOs are about, and they claim that in the end, you guys in your fastest fighters chase these things and can’t catch them.”

I was referring to numerous accounts by multiple witnesses of physical vehicles clearly directed by intelligence that paced them, flew around them, landed near them, or played tag with them, and were clearly powered by something other than our primitive propulsion systems because they seemed to cancel out gravity or use magnetic fields to “fold” space-time and move so fast we couldn’t always catch them.

Bob shifted in his seat and the habitual cocky smile on his face became a perplexed frown. I’ll never forget what he said or how he said it.

“Well, that’s right. We chase the damned things and we can’t catch them.”

Since that time, I asked others of the same quality as Colonel Bob about their experiences. As a priest, I often heard stories of a confessional nature that included fear and amazement by air force pilots, commercial pilots, and plenty of plain people, including many here in Wisconsin, who verified that interpretation: that we had been visited for many years by some of the obviously diverse species that inhabit the millions of galaxies around us.

And we have pursued many of those technologies in secret research into areas thought at first to be violations of the laws of physics. What was wrong, of course, were the limits we set on physics, what was wrong were our theories, not the reports.

Well … this is a blog, not a book. I could go on and on and couch this discussion in subtle nuance and make the many qualifications that one must make to prove one is not a loony or a fool or a fraudster, plenty of whom inhabit this and other domains. We have to make the case of being reasonable and sane because for many decades (the CIA instigated debunking and ridicule as the normative official response about fifty years ago—that’s on the record) because ridicule is so effective. Several decades of that effective policy put reasonable people on the defense and make the subject a joke, which is exactly what was intended.

As a friend who taught deception for one of the intelligence agencies told me, “”Illusion, misdirection, and ridicule, these are the hallmarks of deception—but the greatest of these is ridicule.”

He was a pro, remember, engaged in that activity and an observer of it at a high professional level. And he used the classes he taught in the same way I used the priestly confessional, to gather numerous details over the years about what people experienced in the air, at military bases, and in research facilities, and my friend came to this conclusion, and I quote:

“They’re here, and they have been here for a long time. When people report the same details over sixty years from all over the world, we’re talking about something real. But they don’t want you poking around trying to find out more because the subject covers many things. So far, their presence has been benign. But we don’t know if that will always be the case.”

Back in the eighties, Werner von Braun, the father of the Nazi V2 and our Saturn rocket, told a relative, “The enemy today is communists. That will pass. The next enemy will be terrorists. That too, over time, will pass. Then we’ll need a new enemy and it will be aliens.”

So many people laugh when I tell these and other stories that I expect dismissive ridicule if anyone even reads this. Others with better credentials and more data than I have gone public and are ignored, dismissed, and ridiculed, or the public is distracted with silliness like Anna Nicole Smith. Every day the so-called “news” changes and many of the stories are one way or another by design, not because something happened to happen.

So I am grateful that the CBS local news understood that we are not crazy, or deluded or fools. We don’t have all of the data because we can’t. This subject has been above top secret for years. I know professionals who explored it officially and they are forbidden from even mentioning the “U” word out here.

How can we keep something secret for so long? some will ask. By hiding it in plain sight. Thousands of documented observations fill the newspapers or are discussed in serious legitimate forums like CUFOS (The Center for UFO Studies in Chicago, started by Hynek in the seventies when he realized that the US Air Force was using him as a decoy for Project Blue Book and shunting the best cases somewhere else) from the 1940s on … but through the creative use of illusion, misdirection, sleight-of-hand, and above all, ridicule, the subject has become a joke—just as the CIA stated they intended it to become.

So this entry in an insignificant  local blog, if read at all, will be dismissed with a shrug or a laugh.

But … that’s what the Colonel said, back in 1978, and it shifted my perception of the phenomena forever. Nothing in thirty years of research, confidential interviews, and reading, despite all of the nonsense in the field, refutes the conclusion that the least unlikely hypothesis for some of the observations is the extraterrestrial.

by Richard Thieme

[This story has an interesting history. Way back, when I was still in the Episcopal ministry, I wanted to start writing again and wrote a story called "The Bridge" on which this one is based. I had no idea if it showed promise or not and on an impulse I sent it to John Updike, whose work I had been reading since college days. ("Pigeon Feathers" was the first, I think.)  He wrote a nice letter back encouraging me to continue writing and made some specific suggestions.  Much later, when he came to Milwaukee for a reading, I could tell him how much that kindness and encouragement meant. It reminded me of the time my eighth grade teacher, Ted Besser, told us to write a novel, so I did. I didn't know any better. It was about 150 pages long, a kidnapping thriller. He told me that it was really something, for a 13-year-old, and he took it to a master's degree class to show them. Now, growing up without a father, and male teachers not much in evidence in those days in lower grades, to have a male authority figure affirm a talent no one else in my small family valued very much, meant a lot. I have tried to find Ted Besser to tell him that the significance of his kindness and encouragement was magnified tremendously by my need for it, but never found him. I tell that story to teachers during presentations to remind them that they may never get feedback about the difference they make, but the vulnerability and inarticulate state of young teens nevertheless amplifies their positive energies beyond anything they can guess.  In transition later as an adult, the same vulnerability made Updike's encouragement important. And I still have his letter.

This story, at any rate, is not only psychologically true, it is true in other ways too. We'll have to wait, however, for the Mind of Society to take it in. The woodcarver, of course, c'est moi.

"More Than a Dream" was published in Nth Degree, an online sci-fi magazine, in 2005.]

It wasn’t a dream.

I dream a lot. I know the difference.

It wasn’t a dream.

I am inside a dream when I dream.  I am not transported out of myself into something else. Dreams, like cones, are enclosed. A cone is enclosed; the symbols on something conical, let’s say a conical hat, like half moons and stars on a wizard’s, are finite. What happened in the Bin was not enclosed and the symbols were … more than finite. I don’t mean endless or infinite, I mean … more than finite. I don’t know how to say what they were. They did not behave like delimited images meaningfully exchanged in a shared field of human subjectivity.  The Aliens tried, I am sure, to utilize human symbols with care, intending to simulate or replicate the exchanges they had overheard for centuries. Nevertheless, at one point, all of  the symbols seemed to rise into the air like a scream. Once a bat crawling down from the attic got caught in the ceiling fan in the bathroom. I thought some shrill metal pieces had come loose instead of it being a living thing shrieking.  That’s how the symbols sounded, not only screaming but like that bat, bleeding into the darkness, bleeding into a whirlwind that transformed light into darkness, meaning into chaos. I tried to stand but was held by the straps. I could only clap my hands over my ears, mouth open in a widening O, and cry stop! stop!And they stopped.

The firestorm ceased immediately, broken symbols gently settling through the air like feathers floating to the ground. Symbols falling like confetti thrown by the wastebasket-full from office windows onto the streets below, astronauts back from Mars sitting in convertibles, waving dimly in the whiteout.

Inside the Bin I realized I had held my breath. I exhaled, and the Aliens rearranged things, causing a shift in what I heard or thought I heard. The force field within which they communicated either distorted or no longer distorted, I don’t know which.  Either way, the pain ceased. Then clarity came, spoken symbols entering my awareness gently, feeling like good will, feeling like the generosity of spirit they intended, I know, to be the subtext of our conversation. The warmth of intentional benevolence is irresistible.

That’s how I know it wasn’t a dream.

In a dream, the screaming never stops. The invitation never comes.

My name is Hartmut Lipsky. I live in a basement apartment sublet years ago from a student named Jake who quit and went home to Natoma. He sent a post card once, wishing the oven and refrigerator well. Still stoned, obviously.  I had settled in by then and stayed on. I have lived here for years, not by design, but by default. It was easier to stay than go.

On a bright day, the light in the basement is like twilight. So I installed bands of bright fluorescents that crackle above me when I carve, hissing like bug zappers, me the mindful moth, an erratic percussive rhythm above the soft chunk of the blade whittling wood in my outstretched hands.

I carve for a living, sort of. The simpler truth is, I carve because life seems to work better when I carve.  It even made a little money – now it makes a lot of money, after the Bin – but I would have carved even if no one bought the fantastic creatures I release from their prison of wood. Some are based on games kids play.  Some on toys. Vampires, witches, goblins are popular. Demons and gods from anime. Trolls and dwarfs, too, real ones, the kind that scared my grandmother silly. She told me about them before she died. Described their demeanor as they approached her in a dark wood.

I remember. I remember.

Keeping up with the images in kids’ heads is how I stay sane. They help me learn what symbols come to mean. The same symbols, differently meaning. When you live within symbols, you don’t notice how much they change because there’s no benchmark. It’s like fish swimming in a pond. They notice the water when something catastrophic happens or something anomalous, challenging the consensus, calling attention to itself.

When we try to translate a text, we discover the meanings inherent in our native language. Translations always fail. They never mean what the text said. Carving is like that, too. Translating from nothing into real imagined shapes which emerge from the wood as I whittle teaches … how, it teaches how the Aliens created a matrix of extended-alien-supra-human language as the basis for a self-transcending conversation out of nothing.

The Aliens pulled me through a knot-hole or a not-hole into a looking-glass world. I like to think my little immortals do that for children, too, while they play, all unknowing.

So comic shops and game shops sell legions of my painted creatures. Then I can pay for more wood and make more. Rent is low, heat adequate. Noise enough so I can pretend I am not alone. I hear buses and cars outside and when I climb up and look out the half-window I see through the bars feet walking in sneakers or boots, sandals or high heels, revelations in footwear of the psyches of successive generations.

I go out as often as I need. I don’t hide inside, as some stories have claimed. When I first moved here, I went to the coffee shop every morning and after a couple of years began to fill in as a barista, unusual work for a pretzel-head. Listening closely to long descriptions of the specialized latte someone wanted helped me to focus. That work enabled I believe the real work of my life which is understanding the people on the other side of the counter. Because I was barely above the counter myself, my head twisted back and away from their downward gaze, I learned to listen as well for what they felt. It was like learning to discern subtle colors. I learned to listen around the edges and then when they weren’t looking I would plunge deep. I picked up feelings or thoughts in a form that felt like iron filings in a magnetic field, feeding the base of my brain, going around. I learned to mirror more normal lives transparently and none of them knew when they looked my way that they gazed into the depths of a still pool.

I passed.

But it’s also true that I prefer working to not and I work alone. When I carve, my imagination is all the playground I need. My inner snowglobe is lighted, alive with the world of my mind, a little blizzard always falling on elves or mini-dragons or stone trolls.  I coax what I see from the wood into a tentative shape, but at some point, the wood itself begins to speak. Then I become its partner, a willing servant.

As I have been falsely accused by malicious and ignorant critics of being for the Aliens.

My head is bent up around as you have seen in pictures because of that spinal disease. That happened when I was four. Straight-ahead people as I call them never know if I’m coming or going. After a while, neither did I, which is fine with me. There is nowhere to go, anyway. Journeys are delusions, fabricated itineraries that enable us to invent the trajectories of our lives. I prefer to live with imprecision, poised on the edge of whatever is next; I learned to balance precariously on the heads of minutes ticking by, my tiptoe pirouette through life poised on moments before they dissolve. I dance on transitions, not notes.  I live in the pause, and I grew used to funny looks from normals and returned their stares while peering into their souls. Between the things they say they reveal everything in gesture, inflection, silence. Then they feel me seeing deeply into their wishes or fears and turn away.

Is that why the aliens picked me? Because I can? I’ll never know. You’ll never know, either. Scholars weave hypotheses on looms of illusory objectivity, build reputations on speculation about two unknowns, me and the Aliens. They write reams of not-knowledge about worlds never explored. I don’t mind. They have to invent themselves the same way I invent creatures and give them form. I understand that who we present ourselves to be is carved from the wood of our hopes and dreams.  Nothing comes from nothing. So – we speak again.

I am inscrutable to theories. I am impervious to lies and distortions.

Here’s an example. That proverbial knock on the door did not come at midnight. That’s the first distortion in a now-mythical narrative brimming with lies. The next is that I knew he was coming. The third was all the things I supposedly said when the colonel came. That’s not how all or any of it happened.

The simple truth is, me and the Aliens met in the Bin, wherever it was, whatever it was, and had the courage to face down the horror of the Other. That was the bridge, it turns out, so maybe they did know what they were doing.

However, dear reader, let us turn back to that proverbial first knock. Anything as archetypal as a midnight knock on the door is going to be distorted. So let me say plainly that it came in the middle of the afternoon, one warm day in late June. On a Thursday. It was cloudy, judging from the not-light not illuminating my work surface. Fluorescents hummed above my head as always, and I was twisted as always, twisted around to watch the knife in my right hand whittle the wood into a long-nosed elf with a green mushroom cap on his head. My hand had a life of its own and I was watching, a spectator at my own play, a disinterested tourist in my own territory.

Knock. Knock.

“Who’s there?” I said, startled. I did not expect a visitor.

Knock. Knock knock.

“Who is it?” I said more loudly.

“Hartmut Lipsky?”

“Yes. Who are you?”

“Colonel Nate Reid formerly of the Air Force now of the Space Command.”

I waited.

“What do you want?”

“I want you to open the door,” he said, “so we can talk.”

I slid off the stool and scuttled sideways like a crab to the bolted door. I unlocked and opened it and looked up around at a tall officer. His immense bulk filled his blue uniform filling the doorscape. I thought of a large bullet with eyes and nose painted on for a face. Through his legs and the sharp creases of his blue trousers I saw the steps behind, littered with newspaper, saw the concrete wall shaded gray in the summer light.

“Talk about what?”

The colonel stooped and pressed his face against an invisible pane just inches from my nose.

“I would rather explain inside. May I come in?”

That was the real moment of decision, that was the instant in which I could have said no. But instead I backed in and he followed, closing the door with a soft click.

He looked around at my studio, the unmade bed, the dishes in the sink. He correctly identified a chair under some clothes. “May I sit down?”

I hobbled over and removed some dirty shirts and threw them into the corner.

“Thank you,” he said, settling as best he could into the low seat.

I could see his penetrating gaze more clearly now and looked him up and down and decided to listen. I think you get all the information you need in the first minute or two. I felt like I knew him well enough.

“Tell me,” I said, taking him into my confidence. Master and man becoming man and master. “Tell me.”

The colonel asked about my work, then my background, then my life. I have no reason not to live transparently so I told him. I discussed my childhood, how I learned to imagine in the absence of genuine friends. I talked about learning to like myself inside, then using myself as a sounding board when I decided to engage others. I described the nature of the transformational engine when I turned inside out in my twenties, how I came together again with a snap at the next level. I explained hierarchical restructuring of the psyche in terms of organizational complexity which he better understood. I told him how I listened with my ear to the ground as it were on which others walked. I talked about the wind harps I discovered were the inner lives of women and men, how their music moved me, how I learned to prefer it to making them do things or using them to advance. Because I was so warped or distorted in their eyes, any threat I posed was neutralized by their habitual dismissal of significant difference and I became more like water in which they dissolved. I seldom used what I learned to get things, so my power grew, I believe. I explained this to the Aliens too when they asked me to explain myself. It was little different, really, talking to them in the second phase after the horror of the first had passed, that and talking to this alien human from Space Command.

Then I asked why he came. I asked other questions too, and he talked all around them for twenty or thirty minutes, then got to the point.

“Do you believe in intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?”

“Of course,” I said. “Here or there, what’s the difference? There, here is there.

“I believe, too,” I added, “that we have been visited. We have been sending up smoke signals for hundreds of years. If anyone cared to look at the horizon and see them, if anyone else is curious as we are, always heading for the next hill, then they came and had a look. Wouldn’t we? Don’t we?”

The colonel smiled, his once-grave face reminding me of an egg breaking. “Yes,” he said. “Most of the stories about visits are silliness, disinformation, experiments in social control, the confused self-interest of useful idiots and a cottage industry thriving on lies. 99% of it is that.”

“And the other one per cent?”

“The remaining one per cent consists of observations of a cultural intrusion by a complex civilization into our spacetime. We’ve known they were here for a long time but didn’t know why. Couldn’t do a damn thing about it, either. Now they want to run some tests; more precisely, they want us to run some tests on their behalf while they watch. They’ll learn by watching and we’ll learn by watching them watch.”

I turned off the fluorescents and we sat in the twilight. This immense well-pressed fellow was as out of place in my cave as a gourmet meal. Still, I sensed his genuine interest as well a commitment to the job he had to do. I drew myself closer. If we had had a hearth or a fire it would have been perfect.

“So why are you telling me all this?”

He looked away, perplexed, I guess. The man was used to being in charge. His confident smile died.

“Because they made contact,” he said, “as I have been trying to say. They want a sit-down, want to meet with someone face to face.”

“Is that cool or what!” I felt like a little kid and know I sounded silly. But it was cool,  damn it. Way cool.

“It is,” he acknowledged. “They chose three people and want to pick one to meet. Raafat Nakla from Abu Dhabi unfortunately dropped dead when told of their wishes. That leaves only Luisa Martinez from Union City. And you.”

There was more than a roaring in my ears. There was a maelstrom obliterating prior appropriate forms of thought or behavior, an annihilation of imaginative speculation as his words turned into cold fact. That was the first intimation of impending chaos, of breakdown. Elongated streamers of colorful beliefs were sucked through a knot hole. The twilight in the basement dimmed, the walls fractured, shattered into pieces.  But I was still on my stool, somehow, head bent up toward a silent officer sitting improbably in my chair. I was Hartmut the harmless, the neighborhood cripple, the improbable part-time barista. I understood what he said, but felt that I knew nothing, not my name nor my history nor the form of the future. I was a blank space, an erased letter, a deleted word. The world tilted. The Colonel observed. I enabled, I allowed.

Yes, I said, oh yes I will, oh yes yes. Yes!

Nothing I have told you makes sense. I concede that. But then, that’s the point.

The way we think, nothing makes sense.

Besides, they – the powers that be – layer deceptive skins, playing with us, interlacing skeins of diaphanous fabric stenciled with colorful cartoons. I loved the stealthy way they arranged for everything under cover, for example. In the world, nothing happened. You will never find any evidence that any of this took place. Trucks went down roads, trees might be seen blowing in the wind, but nothing was what it seemed.

In retrospect I realize that the Colonel was not in fact in uniform when he called. He wore navy slacks, a light blue shirt, and a windbreaker, collar up. He also wore opaque sunglasses, which I neglected to mention. At the base the next week I saw him for the first time in uniform and must have pasted that impression onto his first visit like those paper doll clothes we used to cut out and put on cardboard figures with little paper tabs. So if I don’t know what I saw, exactly, that June afternoon, and I was paying close attention, then neither did a casual bystander. That’s why the stories in the tabloids are nonsense. No one saw an officer arrive improbably at the basement door of a crippled woodcarver. Nobody watched, but if they had, they would have seen an anonymous gent in a windbreaker, collar up, walk up the steps with the midget who lives in the basement apartment, get into a blue Ford Taurus and drive away.

Had they followed, which they did not, they would have seen us arrive at the airport twenty minutes later. Instead of following the public road, however, we entered a restricted area and then a hangar and then went down a ramp into a tunnel and came out in another hanger where we entered a waiting plane. The windows were blacked out, it was dark by then, anyway, early evening, and we flew secretly into a dark cloudy sky. We banked and circled and turned this way and that and climbed above the clouds, then headed what I guessed was north. We flew for at least two hours. The colonel was quiet despite constant questions overflowing my brimming brain and bouncing off his stony grave demeanor. The unreality of what was happening made my questions irrelevant, at any rate, because they all had as their point of reference a world that had ceased to exist.

When we landed we left the plane. I held to the wet metal of the handrail and stepped carefully down the slick steps. I inhaled the wet smell of the north woods. Litter and duff and felled timber, said my sniffer. Mold and moss and rich moist loam.

Time was already ticking to a different clock. The crystal prisms defining my landscape shifted sideways. Everything blurred at the edges where the world curved away into nothing. I saw trees and tarmac and hangars in the distance and a few parked planes. If you look at satellite photos you will see nothing. The base is not on any map. I looked, and reporters looked, later, and you can look if you like, but you’ll never find it. You will never corroborate the simple disappearance of a doubtful reality with maps built intentionally to a different plan.

“Smells like ripe watermelon,” I said. “Going to rain.”

“We need it,” he said, speaking down to me. “Farmers are upset.”

I followed him into a low building with naked bulbs surrounded by rainbow haloes as if I had just come out of a chlorine-saturated pool. I must not have been watching where I walked for I tumbled suddenly into a hole and fell end-over-end-over-end, and then I fell some more, end over end over end ….

They settled us into our plain but comfortable rooms and explained the plan for the daylight hours. Luisa Martinez and I would be given tests. That was it. The Aliens had tapped into the commercial database forever ago as well as all the government networks. They found back doors in our back doors and watched us, unobserved. They had been lurking for as long as we had networks. The colonel confessed one night after his third beer that semiconductors had in fact been seeded into our culture when an alien craft crashed but not by accident, oh no. They wanted us to find the chips and build computers and then networks and then the world wide web so we would project the contents of our lives onto screens of digital simulation, showing and telling them everything. The Net was a trojan downloaded into our hive mind and its contents were dye in the arteries of the world soul.

Luisa had little to say, in English. I had little to say, in Spanish. We groped our way toward a viable connection, nevertheless. I loved the way she smiled and how she folded her fat hands in her lap in the creased folds of her flowered dress. I guessed she hadn’t a clue as to what it meant to be chosen to test methods by which another species would arrange for a sit-down, flesh-on-flesh, face time with an alien race. Of course, neither did I nor did the Colonel nor any of the other actors on the set.

“How did they select us?” I asked again and again until it was clear that no one had an answer. It wasn’t something trivial like looking at ants from a high perch and blindly picking some out. These were sophisticated beings, after all, from a remote star system, infinitely older. They may have been ugly but they weren’t capricious. The simple truth was, the military didn’t know. The agencies responsible for intercepting signals and observing near-earth space, monitoring everything inside the asteroid belt in real time, knew for a long time there were meaningful signals and artificial observables behaving with purpose but they didn’t know what they were. They learned to live with ubiquitous surveillance the way the rest of us learned to live with their surveillance of us.  After a while it becomes commonplace, and anyway, there’s not much you can do about it. We can learn to live transparently in a village of any size.

Maybe that’s where working with the kids had given me a leg up. I saw how the technologies of my time had transformed the best brains on a generation into hackers. The Aliens in a way were hackers too, listening in. Getting to the root of a questing humanity, unsure of its footing as it left its home planet for the first time.

Of course, it’s much deeper than that. My hunch is that the Aliens understand us in a way that we can’t imagine because they know with subtlety and depth that information comprises the essential structure of the universe, that relationships between things determine the identities of everything. Rearrange molecules and different substances emerge. Rearrange relationships of beliefs and meanings and cultures transform. Even if you don’t alter the beliefs and meanings themselves, the culture transforms.

The Aliens did their homework, is what I’m saying. I think the medical data was key. Because they had accessed what every therapist entered in every patient record, aggregating and mining the scanned data of every registered human being, data fixed in chips embedded in all of us now, they could discern patterns we couldn’t because our minds were blind to the heuristics or goal states of the search. How could we find what we wouldn’t recognize anyway, even when it was right before our eyes? Which is where of course it always is, anyway. I mean, where else can anything be but existing in the fields of probability that we can or can’t see? The ones we see, we call reality. The others, we say, don’t exist. Reality is a probability wave actualized.

The Aliens, once they had me in the Bin, intended to stretch the boundary between potential and actual, I believe. Take me by the hand and lead me gently into a zone of annihilation.

So the data was our data, linked in ways we couldn’t see, related to points of reference that were utterly alien (duh!) to our history. Everything aligned differently, don’t you see, in their imaginations, painted with colors of a vastly different palette.

I am not saying this abstractly to avoid the hard work of disclosing the details of the complex process that led to the Bin. I am trying to say that the process was not something any of us understood. All we could do was do what they requested, run the maze and recognize when we got the cheese.

Luisa and I endured long tedious days of medical tests. We hunkered down like good little mice, rat-labs, guinea pigs, good little humans. They ran us through scans, sliding us in and out of tubes, sliced and diced our 4D digital images, showed us fascinating displays of fire and light in our brains, monitoring everything we said or did or refused to do. It was all transparent to the Alien Red Team somewhere out there in a nebulous haze.

Luisa grew on me, I admit it, and I think she was fond of me, too. She had worked in a cafeteria in Union City High School, serving macaroni and cheese and chocolate pudding to hoards of raucous students. I concluded that she did it the same way she went through the tests, with a smile and genuine pleasure in her eyes at being alive, just being in the flow. She served, I think, because she loved to serve, finding real fulfillment in dishing out steaming scoops of food to screaming teens. I searched in vain during our truncated conversations or quiet time together for guile, deceit or resentment. I never found any. She was rare, a human being transparent to her kindness, exposing the folly of trying to reduce benevolence to a symptom of dysfunction.

“How do we know the aliens are real?” I said one morning. “How do we know this isn’t a fake air base built to fool us so we’ll go through the tests for whatever reason?”

Luisa smiled, shaking her head. “No se,” was all she said.

“And how do we know that, even if the aliens are real, there aren’t ulterior purposes on either or both sides?”

“No se,” she said again and we both laughed.

Her parents died in an accident when she was a child. She came to Union City in the middle of the night in the back of a van. She worked for a few years picking crops, then got a job mopping schools. She heard about an opening in the cafeteria and applied. That had been her life since.

She spoke of the students with affection. They told her, she said, that she was shaped like a sweet potato, which was true enough, but her lumpy appearance disappeared over the weeks into her personality as I warmed to her presence.

I liked her, in other words, and enjoyed going through the motions with her, all unknowing.

My childhood had not been normal either. My parents did what they could and ran me through procedures at free clinics with predictable results. A little money moved from the government into the pockets of docs but I remained bent. I missed school most of the time and amused myself at home. Naturally other children mocked me and I kept a safe distance, losing myself in stories, dissolving the pain of daylight into the redemptive narrative of comic books and sequential art. I first learned about wood carving on the Hobby Channel. I begged for wood and a knife and began whittling. When the first vague shapes emerged from blocks of wood and little nubs of wooden eyes looked back at my own, I was hooked. The wood coming alive in my hands transformed my life, providing feedback loops that allowed me to leapfrog myself by stages. I grew somehow the way a tree grows from a seed, despite drought, despite fire. I consumed the myths and legends of my heritage, begged my grandmother to tell me again and again the stories of the northern forests, sitting rapt as legacy forms from ancient days threaded down my twisted spine to my stiff fingers and through the chunking knife into wood.

Others liked my little people. They saw in them their dreams, they saw the archetypal forms brimming with the deeper truths of their confused humanity. My little toadlike individuals were often fantastic, but people saw themselves in even the most extreme creatures. I showed them, I think, the gods and demons inhabiting their souls.

The darkness in which I worked turned into light. Being still, I learned to listen. Listening, I learned to see. Seeing, I became an invitation and people completed their own sentences, knowing I never tried to finish anyone’s sentences for them. Listening to their narratives through the feedback loop of my attention, they saw possibilities emerge as if we were at the terminator on the moon where darkness meets light and everything is thrown into relief.

After a month, Nate Reid said it was time for the next step.

We were contacted, he said, pretty much like that movie, Close Encounters. Nothing magical or mysterious, really. They gave us hints and we played them like a computer game. We followed bread crumbs through the forest, but not to a mother ship. Instead we discovered a collection of black boxes, appliances plugged into our networks that no one had noticed, stealthy devices never detected by security. Of course we reverse engineered them and made a honey pot, plugging ourselves and the Aliens into that instead. They knew that but didn’t object. Some think that was the plan all along.

So they watched us watching them watch us. Nothing was being stolen, near as we could tell, nothing sabotaged.. As they claimed, the devices seemed to be translators, letting us interface with a network solely for the purpose of connecting.

Then one day they showed us a recording. This is how we draw you, they said, and now we want you to learn how to draw us.

I was standing before the wall of knowledge, the Colonel said, watching screens update. It’s the connections between the data, between the images, you know, that takes you to the next level. No matter how well we build it, we can’t build in the human brain doing that. There are post-it notes and people shouting around their laptops all the time in the skiff, which tells you what we’re missing. We’re missing the interstitial tissue which would give unity to the level at which we’re stuck and let us move up.

Anyway, on four of the sixteen monitors appeared quadrants of a face. It was more or less human, with reasonably attractive features, expressive eyes with real depth. The smile seemed right, words appropriate to gestures. The moving mouth said human words.

They said they had been observing us for centuries, waiting for the right time. They never said why that time was now. They sketched an image of their origin planet, the planet that spawned the !kiii–^6, they called it, three spiral arms across the galaxy, orbiting a middling sun like ours. Details were obscure, historical facts in short supply. Our questions focused on economics, politics, social and cultural life. They never answered. This was not a tutorial, they said; it was an announcement.

Nexus, they called it. Nexus.

Reid stopped talking. He showed us their planet and the simulated humanoid face. It felt like watching a puppet.

“So?” I said.

“That’s it,” he shrugged. “They concluded with a request for a training program for the three of you, now two. Then the sit-down. A face-to-face is not trivial, they explained. They did not want to alarm us, but they had been plugged into humanity for a long time and as sentient beings go, we are a little quirky. We were worth preserving but first they had to find a work-around so we didn’t sabotage our future. This was that point of inflection, they said, and it was critical to get the design right.”

He paused for effect.

“They told us this morning they had made a choice.”

Anxiety seized me and I jerked. I had treated the adventure as a lark, telling myself the experience alone was worthwhile.  Now I realized I had lied to me again. I nearly pissed my pants.

Luisa sat quietly, waiting.

“Yes, well … Hartmut, the Aliens would like to meet you. If it doesn’t work, Luisa’s the backup.”

“Bueno,” she said, hands folded in her lap.

I tried to say bueno too but couldn’t breathe. The dizzying fall through the rabbit hole had ended and I landed flat on my back. I was exposed suddenly to daylight erupting in my brain so bright I had to squint. But through the narrower aperture of perceptual possibility the horizons of humankind widened at lightspeed and would never shrink again.

I was moved to another part of the air base. Luisa disappeared from my daily routine and I didn’t see her again until long after. I wanted her to confirm that we had indeed shared those four weeks of tests and she did. She has repeated her testimony many times, but you know what they did to the poor woman, ridiculing her broken English, making her sound stupid. Now this good woman is lost to us, ridiculed into silence.

With my physical infirmities, blasting off into space would have been impossible. The Aliens had a better idea.

I called it the Bin and now the rest of you do too. It looked like a storage container with  grooves along the four corners in which strong flexible cables fit. The means of uplift was not disclosed. I went through the drill and sat comfortably in a padded belted seat facing a sealed window. The cables apparently contained a core made of composites which released the energy of uplift when injected with the right amounts of a radioactive liquid. The math breaks down when we try it. It simply doesn’t work.  It worked on July 23rd, however.

This is what I remember:

Without so much as a tremor, the entire Bin rose on its cables soundlessly into the sky. Through the window the landscape fell away or I watched a video, I don’t know. The curvature of the earth appeared, then the blackness of space. I never entered orbit but hung at the top of the needle in the Bin, held there by inexplicable energies or maybe by black magic. There was no feeling of movement. Not a creature stirred, not even Hartmut Lipsky. I sat in my chair as if I were perched on my stool in the studio, waiting for what’s next.

The coupling happened behind so I didn’t see. Some deride me for that fact, saying it plays conveniently to my story. But that’s how it happened. There was a slight shiver behind me and then a sound as the wall became a door and folded down into another Bin or some kind of collapsible compartment which had brought the Aliens adjacent. The Bin became a bigger Bin and I felt a presence, a palpable prop wash of otherness surged into the cabin and I retched. Three of their species let my brain know and steep in the astonishing possibility that became actual after a long pregnant pause. How long did they wait?  Hours, days, years. Who knew? Who knows? They waited until the nausea passed and I was breathing more normally. They waited until I was able to begin to understand.

I tasted something coppery, swallowing hard. The atmosphere was heavy with dread. Had I not been strapped into the seat, I would have plunged through the window, I would have done anything to escape. Through the window I saw the black and blue of sky and space but the hairs on the back of my neck rose with terror at their approach. Something smeared the floor, something green and liquid discharged or was happening behind me. I experienced their wordless greeting as a feeling of imminent doom.

The straps, I realized, were not meant for ascent but for the arrival of the three beings.

“Do you remember what happened on that hill in the driftless area?” a voice said in my head.

I flashed back years before. It was a time of alienation, a time when the pain of being alive made me writhe. Somehow in the ravaged landscape of my torn soul a flash of light illuminated the ragged edges, showing them to be places of possibility. I sat in a yellow van at the top of a hill in the driftless area, land untouched by glaciers, humps of earth and hills. The van was packed with the sick or retarded but I was encapsulated in silence, looking toward a river, a glint in a distant valley. Someone or something other than my companions communicated during that moment of hesitation an image which manifested in my mind, not a memory but a presence, a creature I had never carved, a face unlike and like my own, human more or less, redefining human in our moment of exposure. We looked into each other’s eyes and were fused by the glue of the universe.

“Yes,” I said. “I thought it was a hallucination. I was in that van and we were going to a river town. Everything stopped. Something happened.”

“You were alert during one of our searches. We introduced ourselves. That’s all. You were an ant learning that dogs exist.”

“What?”

“Most ants don’t get that dogs exist. You did.” A presence filled the Bin like air or water ten degrees warmer than the layer adjacent. “The readiness is everything.”

Then the room grew cooler. I pulled at the straps. “I can’t turn. I want to see you.”

“Do you remember what happened next?”

“Yes.  I returned home more than myself. More than human, as we had defined it. Knowing that another hunted our scent through the void.”

“Let’s test it, then.”

Straps fell away and the chair turned slowly. Three lurid creatures resolved dimly in the half light of the Bin and my stomach heaved. They spoke our borrowed language by moving air through body cavities, visible now through translucent skins. The gelatinous cavities were whitish, pinkish, reddish, veined with a vascular system the color of eggplant. Liquids must maintain a metabolic balance, for they dripped or surged in response to a flow that must have threatened disequilibrium. Were those faces? were those sense organs or something analogous in the sac-ridden ballast that filled the hold? I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t see any pattern. My throat tasted of vomit. The stench of otherness, more than pungent, more than repulsive, nearly but not quite unbearable.

I held my gaze on their foreboding forms. I endured.

I trembled with helplessness, aware of being captive in a well-designed cage. They moved closer and that’s when the symbols, barely intelligible, started to scream. No longer chatting on a pre-school level, they endeavored to draw me into a zone of annihilation where the past could implode and impending transcendence emerge. There was no possibility of meaning, not in that moment of extinction when humanity vanished utterly. Nothing could be understood, nothing could span the incomprehensible gulf. I was a sacrificial ant in the slaver of the jaws of the dog. The symbols entering my head heated the circuits of my brain. I covered my ears and cried, “Stop! Stop!”

The communication aborted. Words or images, whatever, dissolved into the gurgle and flow. They immediately spoke a variation in a dialect that sickened me to hear it. I did not want to hear it. So that stopped too. I was still listening, however. I had not denied the necessity of their presence.

“Understood,” someone said. We were back in kindergarten again.

But it wasn’t over.

Fingernails screeled on chalkboard, but inside me, then stopped. Reach! I ordered my distant self, looking as the sun must look from Pluto. Reach!

From a nether world a question arose. I said it aloud, hearing my voice speak.

“What is it like to be a child on your world?”

I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. Someone told me. The nurture of disturbing tendencies instead of elimination made for greatness, they believed. They cultivated anomalies, dismissed more conventional frames. Gently however. Always gently. Sports were woven in a glad-basket of helpful extensions. Binding otherhood in time.

“Ah! Then tell me about do you call it as we do family. When you travel, do you miss someone? anyone?”

Someone sighed. Family or its like was linked in inkless loops of bound discourse and the memory of pleasure, threaded throughout a vascular system that remained strange whether metaphor or fact. I thought it horrific a moment ago and now it was benign. As metaphor it was a shared point of reference, however I misunderstood.  Bubbles looked like … inflections, not discharge. A means of equilibrium. Family too. Family a multiple spawn of a matrix of related skins, undiminished by outbreeding of sentiment or felt presence. Distance and the unexpected elimination of individuals weren’t the same because individuals didn’t exist nor would they ever exist again for us, not like they used to. Tiddlywinks. We were networked now and the network does its work quietly by design over summers of time. Then fruit detaches from a branch at a mere touch. Images of countless others glowed suddenly on their translucent skins like reflections on soap bubbles, an infinite regress making me cry. I saw more than possibility now. I had crossed over. I saw symbols become quietly more and I cried quietly for a long time.

When I was able to speak again, I said, “When you saw stars for the first time, did you sense the immensity of the universe? did you feel wonder?”

Listening felt like carving. Something out of nothing. Something was in the Bin that didn’t have a name. A smile or its analogue slid along their skins, a viscous slick, rainbows shining on its surface like water in oil.

Then they showed me something akin to wonder. It felt as if a toddler was coming down the steps for the first time, its little hand in someone’s bigger hand. Its wide eyes looked across the street where one day it might go.

We conversed now on new ground.  The dude inside, obliterated, nevertheless abides. Heavenly delight sparked my realization. I had lasted. My capacity to remain intact while staying available to an alien presence had been tested.

And I passed.

”Takes time,” someone said. “Like leapfrog.”

The Bin emptied and filled with kinship and joy.

Then it emptied in fact, not a symbolic fact, a physical fact, and I was alone in a chair going down. The window became bright then gray then rain pelted the thick glass and I arrived at a base in the north woods. The door was a door again and opened, making me shiver in the wet chilly air. Rain blew into my face in sheets. The storm had broken in my absence and the sky was dark oh dark indeed.

I crept from the Bin, cold and wet, into a crowd of waiting expectations; I was unable then or later to shelter myself completely from their appetites. They all took a piece. I was debriefed, scanned again, debriefed again, then dissected by shrinks and all the means at the disposal of our primitive minds and science.

When they finished they told me the new plan.

I was to say nothing.

“It’s better that way,” said the Colonel. “Then we can analyze their game plan using the data you provided.”

“Is that all I am to you, then?” I asked. “A sensor?”

“In a nutshell,” said the Colonel, “yes.”

I was taken to a hangar and flown home.

Who leaked it first? No one knows or – more accurately – no one is telling. The media found Luisa and made her look like a simpleton. Her smile played well on the wide screen and her big brown eyes, without guile, were touched up to appear shallow. Then they found me and bent me a second time, this time with perceptual leverage, making me into the image that most of you know.

Transparent to the end, I told and tell my story without significant variation. I don’t hesitate or pretend to remember. I just say it. A thousand organizations from cults to corporations want to rent me, lease me, or buy me outright. All I want to do is stay in my cave, my tomb, my womb, and carve what I have seen, my life theme and its variations, worlds without end.

The Colonel denied everything. The event was spun in the mind of society as the febrile dream of a lonely mole.  News groups gathered documentation to support the official twist. Tabloids, owned by intelligence agencies, did their job, rendering the event absurd by covering it in detail. Investigative reporters scoured the north woods and as I predicted found nothing. How could something so fantastic happen at a base that did not exist? Rumors grew like mushrooms, spreading wildly in the dark. Despicable as their campaign was, the malicious spin boosted sales and enhanced the value of my work. Reinforced by intermittent repetition, the persona stuck, and Hartmut Lipsky is now and will be forever a half-mad recluse inventing stories every bit as fantastic as his carved hobgoblins.

People looked for a squid and saw a squirt of ink or they looked at the wrong thing, the real eclipsed by sleight of hand. Or they looked at an elephant hiding in plain sight, unable to believe what they saw or afraid to say.

No secret sharer emerged from the shadows to reassure me with a furtive whisper that I was sane. No corroboration from an unknown source leaked into the public domain. Instead the horses of distraction went galloping down cobblestone roads, leaving me with a quieted if still slightly uneasy mind in a twilight world where I am free to carve, converting memories into images. My tableaux of the Aliens, me seated before them in the Bin, sold more than a billion copies. Alien dolls with sophisticated hydraulics sell for a good buck. Some discharge or leak by design. Computer games take you to the Bin to shoot it out with Aliens unlike any I ever met. Saturday morning cartoons retell the story, extending it in fanciful directions. Then they write books based on the cartoons and make movies based on the books. They twist the symbols into a thousand fantastic forms.

I give up. I surrender. If fiction is the only place I can tell the truth, then fiction it is.  I have long been accustomed to looks and whispers and a reputation for strangeness. This is a deliverance. Inside my all-too-human heart now is a deep well of serenity. Even if everything I have said is a lie, the lie contains the deeper truth.

Tiddlywinks. One disc at a time, hopping another. Leapfrog. A fractal landscape we sentient creatures climb to self-similar discoveries at every level.

All I know is they came and got me and I went where they took me. Then I connected in the Bin with the slobbering ambassadors of another civilization. I asked some questions and listened to their answers. We created or discovered together a means of making sense. Then they left and my role, whatever it was, was over.

Sometimes at night when I am done working, I outwalk the city lights and scan the skies for stars. I see and imagine planets, half create or half perceive the inhabitants of whom the Aliens whispered. My dreams are alive with creatures with silvery wings hovering over oceans aglow with iridescent scales, with the heads of dragons, fire-breathing, and with gargoyles and angels, their glass skins the colors of amethysts, sapphires and rubies. I don’t know if I am remembering or merely dreaming. But I know, and you know too, now, that the angle of our consensus has shifted. I know and you know too that the future is past, that the days to come are already here, and the bridge that we built or became in the Bin is crossed in all directions, myriads of beings of a thousand shapes and hues streaming in the light of setting suns.

Interview with Edgar Mitchell, ScD., Captain USN (Ret)

by

Richard Thieme

RT: You’ve been involved with consciousness studies, including the exploration of UFOs, for some time. What’s your primary focus?

EM: My focus has never been primarily on UFOs. My focus has been consciousness studies for thirty years. I kind of back doored into this because of my work in consciousness studies and talking to John Mack about abductees or experiencers as he prefers to call them.

I ran into a large number of what I call the “old timers,” people in government, in the military and intelligence work going back fifty years, who say, “Yes, it’s all true.”

RT: When I was a parish priest on the edge of an air force base, I was told by a member of the parish, an air force fighter pilot, that some basic reports were true – that pilots encountered vehicles which paced fighters and flew rings around them, doing things that even in black budget projects at the time to my knowledge were impossible. Because I know that black budget projects create technologies that seem fantastic to ordinary people, I like to focus on early reports, from 1947-1952, when the waters were not quite so muddy.

EM: That has been my focus too. I grew up in Roswell NM and remember when that story broke. I was just a kid in high school. When it was dismissed the next day as weather balloons I wrote it off and went about my business. My grandparents were in the cattle business and knew the Brazells. So we were there but it never really came back to me until ten-twelve years ago when I really became interested in the consciousness stuff and John Mack and I started getting literature and seeing names I recognized from Roswell. I was close personal friends with Werner von Braun. Although he never mentioned that event, he was very interested in my consciousness work. And then a few other people, military, retired generals and admirals, that years ago I happened to encounter, and they all said oh yes, it really was all real, we just couldn’t talk about it at the time. They’re still reluctant to talk about it.

RT: “It” means …?”

EM: Something like the Roswell incident was real. I’m not sure we have all the details correct right down to the nitty-gritty fundamentals but the fact of the incident itself and it being a non-earth craft, that seems to be without question according to the testimony of these people.

RT: What is your understanding of the phenomena at this point?

EM: We discovered 8-9 years ago a mechanism in physics called the quantum hologram. It was discovered trying to perfect MRI machines and build quantum computers. Trying to improve the resolution and imaging on a MRI resulted in the quantum hologram. It’s rooted in the fact that matter at its most basic level does not consist of ping-pong-ball atoms but flowing dynamic energy. Quanta of energy are emitted and reabsorbed by all matter down to the most basic level.

Those emissions from all physical objects are quanta but it has turned out that they are sufficiently coherent that they carry information about the object and we now have both theory and good experimental evidence on that fact. The interesting thing is that the information is non-local. The formalism of the quantum hologram is non-local.

To have nature having a non-local information structure that carries the event history of each physical object puts a whole different perspective on things. When these guys brought this to me I had given a lecture at Cambridge University, St John’s College, in England, on what I call a dyadic model, which says, if you start with energy and information and define information as patterns of energy, then the basis of our universe has two fundamental aspects. It exists because of its energetic structure and it’s knowing because of the information structure. If you start with that basic premise, that energy has two forms, a structural form and a patternal form which is the basis of knowing anything, so that information is the basis of knowing anything and patterns of energy are just information, if you start with that you can build a pretty decent cosmology for an evolving  knowing thinking universe. Because we evolved out of it and are part of the universe, therefore it must be a knowing thinking universe.

This also goes back to the very definition of non-locality coming out of quantum physics, that particles ever interacting maintain a spin correlation wherever they go until they interact with something else. The quantum hologram takes that idea from the particle level and expands it to all macro scale objects. It extends quantum mechanics from the particle level to virtually all matter. And it says that all matter not only has a local here-and-now structure but also a non-local everywhere informational structure. The history, the events in the life of that object, are carried non-locally throughout the universe. We know so little about the characteristics of non-locality. With the quantum hologram, it is mathematically defined that information is recovered through resonance. We have written the math on it and we have physically done it in the laboratory. But still, exactly how a non-local resonance takes place, we don’t know; we know it takes place in far distances compared with the size of a particle, but what that means in terms of the universe, I haven’t the faintest idea. And neither does anyone else. But still, the mathematics shows that the hologram is non-local and if you look carefully it starts to show why we have psychic experience and internal mystical experience, in fact, it seems to be why we have subjective experience at all.

RT: When I was a priest, I used to use exercises in psychometry, which is a kind of clairvoyance during which people attempt to receive impressions or information from objects, to illuminate the porosity of boundaries. Some results were striking.

EM: Richard, that is precisely what the quantum hologram as a structure explains. So I have written several papers on this, as are others. I started working on it in 1995 after these fellows came to me after my lecture and said we think we’ve found a structure that seems to validate what you’re saying about information, we’re using it for quantum computers and MRI machines. Those guys and I have been working on this for five years and the concepts are finding their way through the science and physics literature. Not in Nature yet but a few mentions, no major article yet – they’re too conservative – but papers have been written on how DNA learns, how cells learn. Our thesis is that consciousness is not a thing but a feedback loop in nature. How does an electron know what its spin is supposed to be if it’s across the universe from its partner? If you take that to the complex level of the organized brain, then the knowing is appropriate. But the very basis of this non-local resonance that occurs at the particle level, if you then say, it is a feedback loop, a resonance feedback loop which we observe here in macroscopic nature, it would appear that this is precisely what consciousness is, except that I prefer the words awareness or perception, because it appears that only animals with brains have self-awareness and only Homo sapiens have self-reflective awareness and can reflect upon our reflections. All animals with a brain can distinguish self from nature, but animals without brains have awareness and perception but not self-awareness, they’re part of the environment. If you trace that down to the inanimate world where the quantum correlation of particles prevails and the quantum hologram is still a property of inanimate matter, it’s saying that nature does not lose its experience, nature is informational and conscious at some level. That’s the work I have been pursuing. To say that consciousness is not amenable to scientific study is just plain wrong.

RT: The biggest barrier is scientific –

EM: Kuhn was right and so was Max Planck, who said that progress in science is not made by convincing skeptics but funeral by funeral. That’s what we’re dealing with.

RT: Whether it’s religion or science, the dynamics are the same.

EM: To jump to the bottom line, the quantum hologram is as close as we come in the moment to the theological concept of spirit of soul. What it doesn’t do in this model is have discarnate action, it’s an informational structure, and that fits into the great sea of consciousness concept which this model suggests is absolutely right.

RT: Are other astronauts involved in this search?

EM: Not many astronauts are philosophically deep. But many of the younger ones accept UFO phenomena and are open to meditation or the paranormal and other consciousness explorations. I have often been a lone wolf, a voice in the wilderness, but I have worked in this for thirty years and it’s finally paying off.

RT: What you’re saying makes sense from so many converging points of view that are helping us construct reality in new ways.

EM: The Cartesian division between materialism on one side and spirituality and mentality on the other in a different realm is wrong.

RT: Paranormal phenomena is difficult to discuss because, by the time you can say what “it” is, the names disappear. They names don’t distinguish real differences.

EM: They don’t mean anything. That’s exactly right. And that’s what the quantum hologram shows. People who purport to communicate with the dead or have psychic experiences are picking up information from the morphogenetic field or the holographic field and as far as they’re concerned, it’s real, and it is real, but their interpretation is not correct.

RT: Abduction “evidence” too comes from people in altered states either at the time or afterward at the hands of researchers. So how can we know the objectivity of what’s reported?

EM: That’s right,. People will interpret it through their own experience and biases. That’s how I got involved. John Mack was reading some of my material and asked me how to interpret some of his work. That’s what got me into the ET stuff. Also, given this type of model, and chaos theory, the bottom line is, we live in a self-organizing creative intelligent learning trial-and-error participatory interactive evolving universe. That’s quite a different story than we had twenty years ago. And it sets the stage to say that life has evolved everywhere the environmental conditions are correct.

RT: If life can happen, it will happen.

EM: Exactly. Much of 20^th century science, like special relativity, limits on the speed of light, dismissing non-locality as unimportant, all that is being challenged as just being wrong. I think over the next few decades, we will discover the physics that allowed ETs to get here.

RT: You wrote a very strong endorsement of Paul Hill’s “Unconventional Flying Objects: a scientific analysis” (Hampton Roads: 1995) which articulates a solid basis in contemporary physics for understanding the propulsion systems of UFOs as observed and reported. You wrote, “Paul Hill has done a masterful job ferreting out the basic science and technology behind the elusive UFO characteristics and demonstrating they are just advanced and exotic extensions of our own technologies.”

EM: Yes. He was right on. He did a good study of the data. The data says things on radiation, energy, he uses “force field,” we would call that zero-point energy field now, but by and large he approached it correctly. He had very good data, categorized it and evaluated it according to science as understood now. He said, we don’t have it yet but it’s not outside the realm of science that we understand.

RT: What’s your sense at the age of seventy of where this is all headed? How will you be thinking about this in five or ten years?

EM: In space I had an epiphany, an experience of the connectedness of everything. I later came to understand it. It’s where you experience, see the separateness of things with your physical eyes but experience the connectedness of all things in an altered state. From that point on, life was never the same for me. I had to come out and find what these deep issues are, recognizing that our scientific cosmology was incomplete and out religious cosmologies archaic. I was looking for a new myth about ourselves, but by myth I mean truth.

For thirty years, we have been looking at connecting these dots and finding new dots to connect to create the picture better. All of these changes in science, beginning with chaos structure and special relativity and its limitations. and discovering what the devil resonance means in terms of non locality, to me those are the key elements because they bring consciousness into it. They bring the fact that information in the universe is not limited by the speed of light and maybe nothing else is either. I think within the next decade or so and probably within the next few years the real truth of this visitation we have experienced will be uncovered. The momentum is building for that right now, very strongly. Now, I always have to qualify my remarks by saying, I have no firsthand experience with ET stuff or even UFO stuff so I have to preserve some wiggle room by saying I could be totally wrong –

RT: But that’s the way it looks.

EM: That’s the way it looks at the moment. Our science in the 21^st century will do very shortly to Einstein and Pauli and Schroedinger what they did to Newton a hundred years ago. Their science is great as far as it goes but it doesn’t go far enough.

RT: If it’s good science that has to happen.

EM: It has to happen. I think we’re ready for a major paradigm shift. We’re already seeing it on the frontiers of science. Mainstream academicians are still stuck but it doesn’t look like the Big Bang is the right answer. Hoyle’s most recent work, Halton Arp’s most recent work, is powerfully damning to the Big Bang, which is a knee-jerk reaction to the red shift. It’s just not right. So we have, it looks like, a whole new era of science about to open up, provided that humanity can survive.

RT: Let me take the ET hypothesis one step further. Most of the people I talk to – various individuals, never anyone on the record, but people who have had astonishing encounters, air force pilots, commercial pilots, even some in the intelligence community say that while what they are saying is not classified, they have talked to X off the record who talked to Y – these people seem to generally articulate the same point of view on the reality of UFO phenomena, the reality of visitation. But given what we know about psychological operations and counter-intelligence, cover and deception, simulated phenomena to cover technological advances, I can’t go any further that listening to what they report and remaining agnostic. I don’t know how much is bumbling, or organized forgetfulness, or confusion, or intentional disinformation.

EM: There is so much disinformation and misinformation that is deliberate. There is clearly a covert attempt to disguise and debunk this information.

RT: So how do we know? How do we know what we know? What methodology, what procedure would a reasonably intelligent guy follow to determine as clearly as he can what is likely to be likely?

EM: Richard, I can’t answer that question, only because I think in terms of chaotic systems, systems in disequilibrium. When systems are far from equilibrium they are not predictable and they can go any way, and this is a not-predictable system, it’s a pot boiling, and exactly where it will break out and bubble over, no one has the answer to that. It is going to be determined by the collective unconscious more than the plans of whoever is trying to keep the lid on this. There’s no doubt that someone is trying to keep the lid on it. Who that is, how it is, where it is, we only get glimmers.

I have personally been told by a senior officer on a joint intelligence committee a few years ago – all he would say, when asked the question, is there an organization still doing all this? all we could get out of him was, a couple of weeks later, after he did some checking, “Yes. You’re right.” That’s all he would say.

I don’t know what much more we could do. What some of us are trying to do is get congressional pressure put on it, but politicians are so politically sensitive about their careers that not one in ten thousand will touch it. We tried and tried and almost got there a few times and then they backed out.

RT: At that point, you have no idea what they’re encountering in terms of resistance.

EM: No we don’t. We don’t know if someone came in the office and closed the door and told them, shut your goddamn mouth or it’s peer pressure or election pressure or what.

RT: Without triangulating data, you can’t know.

EM: No. All we can do is go on the preponderance of data and the preponderance of data is so overwhelming that at least some portion of this activity is ET activity. A goodly portion of it, it would now appear, is not ET activity. There are black programs where they can emulate some of the so-called ET phenomenon. It appears they are doing it. But when we’ve said these things, we can’t say them with a hundred per cent certainty. We’re still guessing. It’s a terribly complex, difficult phenomena and there are a lot of people opposed. The fundamentalist religious community recognizes that it will destroy established religion as we have known it, if it comes out.

In my opinion, the theological structure that comes closest to what we’re seeing with quantum holographic work is Tibetan Buddhism. It comes right out of shamanism and Buddhism as it entered Tibet centuries ago. I consider the dispersed Tibetan scholars to be some of the greatest scholars on consciousness studies that we have. Their notion of spirit, reincarnation, etc., dovetails well with work in quantum holography. I lecture on reincarnation and say that you can’t tell the difference in principle between an old soul and a new soul with a long memory. You just tune into the collective unconsciousness, and claim the memories as your own. From a therapeutic point of view it does not matter what model or structure you use. If people trying to resolve early life trauma can pull out of the collective unconscious information about an event that can help them understand or heal their trauma, it doesn’t matter where it comes from. It’s irrelevant from the therapeutic point of view but for those of us trying to articulate the new mythology disguised as truth, it’s important.

RT: Explanations have to be congruent with the other pieces of our constructions of reality. We’re trying to build a multi-faceted construction of reality now within which we can have discourse like this. That’s challenging.

EM: Much of what happened to me that I would have liked to talk about, I have not talked about for thirty years, because the culture had not moved far enough forward for it even to compute. I would have sounded like a madman.

RT: Breakthrough ideas always sound crazy. You have to build bridges to others’ consensus reality so they can speak with you.

EM: Exactly right. Thirty years ago, working with mystics and shamans, seeing what was real … yes, it was real, but how do you fit it into a framework that matches the rest of reality that we know about?

If we could get the world’s leaders out there to look at the earth from deep space, we would have a very different political system than the one we have.

In 1971, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, then a U.S. Navy Captain, became the sixth man to walk on the moon.

He is a scientist, test pilot, navel officer, astronaut, entrepreneur, author and lecturer. In 1973, he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences to sponsor research in the nature of consciousness. He is co-founder of the Association of Space Explorers, an international organization founded in 1984 for all who share the experience of space travel.

He is author of The Way of the Explorer (Putnam, 1996) and Psychic Exploration: A Challenge for Science (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974.

[This is "flash fiction," a new category generated from the fact that smaller texts are more congenial to online reading at the moment. This was published in The Listening Eye in 2005. Come to think of it, this is a riff on a theme often heard in my reflections on anomalous phenomena. I probably should call it "flash non-fiction."]

The Necessity for Invention

by Richard Thieme

The look on the major’s face sold his story.

We were sitting in the church basement. I was the major’s priest. I had long ago learned that he kept his own counsel and never told tales out of school. When I described weird planes with strange crooked angles landing at the base at night, he never said a word about stealth. He just smiled and looked away.

The Major thought I was a crazy liberal who had to be endured because his wife wanted their kids in a Sunday School away from the base. Nevertheless there were moments when we were just shooting the breeze and everything was natural. That night in the church basement was one. We had stopped to look at damage to the floor from a broken pipe. I think because the Spielberg movie was recent, one of us brought up UFOs. Hynek was either alive or recently dead and I mentioned his book about close encounters.

“Hynek says you guys in your fastest fighters chase these things and can’t catch them.”

Now, this was a guy with the right stuff. He would walk into the church wearing his Stetson and cowboy boots, a stogie smoking under the brim of his hat, and stand there, letting everything settle like he was the natural center. He usually looked confident, even cocky. That night, though, he looked perplexed.

“He’s right,” he said. “We chase the goddamned things and we can’t catch them.”

Years later I was telling this to a friend who worked at the National Security Agency, saying this was the first time someone I knew said UFOs weren’t bogus. I said that over the years others had told similar stories, always in a confessional mode. They often sounded ashamed, reminding me of children who had been abused.

“That comes from years of ridicule,” my intel buddy said. “It’s very effective when you have to hide something in plain sight.”

He told me that he too used his position to query others in intelligence or the military when they had been close to something rumored at White Sands or an air base. He heard comparable stories from people he trusted too.

“So what’s going on?”

“There’s an intrusion of another civilization into our spacetime,” he said, “but people can’t see it. Ants don’t get that dogs exist.”

“How can we talk about it, then, so people don’t think we’re nuts?”

“Fiction,” he said. “Fiction is the only way to tell the truth.”

So … this is fiction.

Space travel is utter bilge, the Royal Astronomer said the year before Sputnik went up. Besides, you can’t get here from there. Everybody knows that. Our understanding of physics wouldn’t let us. So what else could it be?

This is fiction. The Major and my friend from NSA are invented. Neither exists. I’m not a priest.

Nothing is anything. Nobody sees things. Nobody knows.